Hello American prestige listeners. It's Derek. I am joined, as always, by my friend and comrade, Danny Bessner, and we are very pleased to welcome back for a special report. Spencer Ackerman, returning champion, Spencer is the author of reign of terror.

He's the founder and author of the Forever Wars newsletter at Ghost.

He is also the writer of the Ironman comic book.

We've had you on to discuss things in all of these areas.

But today we want to talk about the detention

of Mahmoud Khalil. You wrote a piece on this at your newsletter, Mahmoud Khalil's detention

is a war on terror milestone. So Spencer, thank you for coming on the program. And let's talk

about who Mahmoud Khalil is. What is this case? Give people the background. Yeah, thank you guys for having

you. This is a really important episode because this development really puts, I think,

everything this political moment faces right on the table. Mahmoud Khalil is a leading demonstrator

on behalf of the cause of, I don't know what you would even say at this point, Palestinians being able to survive at Columbia University.

My understanding, he's a recent graduate of one of their grad schools there, the School for International Public Affairs.

And on Saturday night, as he was returning from an Iftar dinner with his eight-month-old

pregnant wife, Mahmoud, who is a green card holder and his wife, who is an American citizen,

were intercepted in their

building by plainclothes officers who turned out to be with ICE and told that he was going

to be taken into detention, in which, according to his wife and his attorney, or one of his

attorneys, he was taken with a dubiously legal

warrant for his arrest. It's unclear if that arrest was in fact signed by a judge. And also,

the housing that the Khalil family lives in is Columbia University housing, raising a lot of questions about the

extent to which Colombia is allowing ICE on their campus and their campus extending to its

facilities. Kalil was in fact taken into custody. There had been confusion for a while on Sunday and early Monday

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