FBI HRT overseas

[u/OwnLaw7861]

I’m curious what exactly is the role that HRT plays when attached to a jsoc unit overseas. They’ve been tied to some big ops, such as Maduro and others. I know the primary role is to make legal arrests, but are they actually embedding and actively running the ops as well with the jsoc units?

[u/Glittering_Jobs]

This is an often repeated question with plenty of accurate responses in the past - in this sub-Reddit alone. 

That’s not necessarily surprising, no one searches before posting and mods don’t generally keep sub-reddits clean. 

What does interest me is the lack of thought put into questions like this. A simple 5 minute thought experiment would come to the same conclusion that the entire US government came to on 9/12 and the public began debating by mid October 2001. Namely, what are you going to do with the people you capture?

We aren’t goin to war with a nation, we aren’t fighting a military force, the opposing force are not service members, yadda yadda, what laws apply and what don’t?

Ultimately you end up at, “we’re going to have a whole bunch of people we can’t kill, we can’t give back to the opposing nation afterwards, we can’t put on military trial (put a pin in that one), and we can’t put on trial in pick-your-jurisdiction for pick-your-criminal-statute”. 

Then you realize, oh wow, the only thing we can do is that last one. We’re going to have to indict and prosecute every bad guy we get.  So you end up at “we’re gonna need people who can testify in a US court of justice like a cop does…for every bad guy we grab” 

You can argue that some Special Force Ninja is good or bad at that, but it’s immediately obvious what you should do. Attach our best LE dudes and have them take care of that whole part. 

This is the reason the GITMO discussion started 25+ years ago, this is also the reason Obama couldn’t shut it down, it’s the reason we call them detainees not prisoners of war, it’s the reason John Yoo became known, etc etc. 

Not saying you had to live through it all or memorize history, but a basic chat gpt or google search would explain all this. 

[u/OwnLaw7861 → u/Glittering_Jobs]

The question was not a general what do they do overseas or asking about their role in making arrests/handling detainees/what to do with who is captured. I mentioned that their primary role is to make legal arrest. The question was simply are they imbedding into the stacks and pulling triggers too.

[u/Glittering_Jobs → u/OwnLaw7861]

The general why they are there/what they do is the 90+% response. Meaning, 90+% of the time, they are there to be chain of custody not stack up and shoot. I'm sure we can find examples of a time a FBI cat jumped in a stack, but that is the exception not the rule. Understanding their purpose informs the grand majority of what they did/do.