Military Police: Enemy Prisoners of War, Retained Personnel, Civilian Internees and Other Detainees is the full title of a United States Army regulation usually referred to as AR 190-8, that lays out how the United States Army should treat captives.[1]
This document is notable as the United States Supreme Court advised the Department of Defense, in its ruling on Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in 2004, that the Tribunals the DoD convened to review the status of the Guantanamo captives should be modeled after the Tribunals described in AR-190-8.
As a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, the United States is obliged to convene a "competent tribunal" to determine the status of any captive "should any doubt arise" as to their proper status.[2]
The Third Geneva Convention states that all captives must be accorded the protections of POW status until a competent tribunal convenes, and determines the captive does not qualify for such status.[1]
On June 4, 2007 Colonel Peter Brownback and Naval Captain Keith J. Allred dismissed all charges against Guantanamo captives Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan, on jurisdictional grounds. They ruled that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 had only authorized the Guantanamo military commissions to charge captives who were classified as "illegal enemy combatants", and since Khadr and Hamdan's Combatant Status Review Tribunals had only made the determination that they were "enemy combatants", their military commissions lacked the jurisdiction to hear the charges.