Michael Bumgarner
US Army officer
Michael Bumgarner (born 1959) is an American former career officer in the military police of the United States Army. He was 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.
Early life and education
Michael Bumgarner is the son of a career army sergeant major and his wife, in a family that valued military service. By high school, he was living in Kings Mountain, North Carolina.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Bumgarner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.