Military career After graduating from Yale, Lietzau continued his military service as a Marine Corps judge advocate. Lietzau also served in a variety of traditional roles as a marine lawyer, including as prosecutor, defense counsel, military judge, special assistant U.S. attorney, staff attorney, chief of the Law of War Branch for the Department of the Navy's International Law Division, and chief of government appellate attorneys for the Department of the Navy. Lietzau played a role in a diplomatic controversy in February 2012 when a writ of
habeas corpus in the
United Kingdom compelled the UK government to seek the return to them of a
Pakistani national held by the United States in Afghanistan that the British had apprehended in
Basra, Iraq, in 2004. They handed
Rahmatullah over to American forces, who transferred him to the
Bagram Theater Internment Facility. The
UK Supreme Court ruled that his transfer was in violation of international law (see
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs v Rahmatullah). On July 14, 2011, US forces accidentally released a secret form used to classify whether captives were an "Enduring Security Threat" to the
American Civil Liberties Union. Lietzau explained that the accidental release posed a security threat to the United States as it : According to the
New York Times in an interview in the late Summer of 2012 Lietzau said the United States was "on a trajectory to be able to comply" with an agreement to devolve control of the
Bagram Theater Internment Facility to Afghan control by the agreed date of September 9, 2012. The
New York Times noted that the Lietzau referred to September 9 as a "milestone", rejecting the word "deadline". It noted Lietzau said the agreement only applied to the captives who were in custody when the agreement was signed, and that the United States was nevertheless going to retain certain selected captives under permanent US control—including all the non-Afghan captives. Lietzau sent an email to his staff and colleagues in July 2013, letting them know he would step down from his position by September 1. He was offered a more senior policy position in
the Pentagon that would have allowed him to retain authority over detention issues generally, but he could not commit to staying in any new job long enough. Lietzau has played a major role in shaping detention policies across two administrations. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when he was a uniformed lawyer for the Marine Corps, he served as an adviser in the creation of the first version of President George W. Bush's system of military commissions trials. In the Obama administration, he has been the primary official shaping policies for "law of war" detention at the prison at Guantánamo Bay and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. ==Controversy==