Guantanamo Military Commissions: Lessons Learned and the Way Forward

ASIL, in cosponsorship with its Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict, will host a discussion of the United States's decade-long experience with military commission proceedings against detainees held at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, featuring Jess Bravin, an award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay. Bravin will summarize the findings in his book, which draws on more than a decade of first-hand reporting at Guantanamo and extensive interviews with insiders in the commission process. He concludes: "It's too late ... to do commissions right the first time. The question remains whether they can be done right at all." Responding to Bravin's account, the discussion will also feature Charles "Cully" Stimson, manager of the National Security Law Program and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and formerly deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, in which role he advised then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and coordinated the Pentagon's global detention policy and operations, including at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan; and Andrea Prasow, Senior Counter-terrorism Counsel at Human Rights and formerly a defense attorney with the Office of Military Commissions, where she served as assistant counsel for commission defendant Salim Hamdan.