Michael Bumgarner

Who is Michael Bumgarner?

Colonel Michael Bumgarner has been a career officer in the military police of the United States Army. He is most noted for having been the commander of the Joint Detention Group, the guard force component of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, from April 2005 through June 2006, at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. During this period there was a widespread hunger strike in 2005, which he helped end. On June 10, 2006 three detainees were found dead, in what the United States Department of Defense announced as suicides. Bumgarner had other assignments after Guantanamo and retired from the military in 2010.

In 2009 a report by Seton Hall University Law School criticized the DOD NCIS investigative account of the deaths as full of inconsistencies and errors. In a joint investigation by Harper's magazine and NBC News, a January 2010 article by Scott Horton asserted that Bumgarner and other senior military personnel at Guantanamo and in the Department of Defense participated in a cover-up of homicides of the three detainees, resulting from severe interrogations at a black site outside the main camp. The issue has not been conclusively settled.