The Commander's Responsibility for the Delivery of Religious Support to the Detainees in the JOA: Accommodation of Religious Needs Balanced with Necessary Security Concerns
Abstract
In recent operations, Regional Combatant Commanders (RCCs) have been tasked with new challenges in providing for the treatment, care, and accountability of detainees. Included in this tasking is the responsibility to insure detainees have the latitude to exercise their religious faith. This is an unfamiliar territory for many, and certainly not an art in practiced recent memory. These new challenges in relationship to religious support include understanding the boundaries set in the law of armed conflict, coming to terms with the definitions of detainees categories, religious support, and roles of providers, as well as understanding and tackling emerging concepts relating to enemy combatant detainees and the Global War on Terror. Headlines since 2002 have reminded us of the unintended consequences of what happens when we get it wrong. Remember the news stories of LT Saif-ul-Islam in Guantanamo Bay? We saw what happened when a chaplain trained at a tactical level, assigned to an operational staff, was given a role of great strategic significance.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 23, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA463665
Entities
People
- Robert T. Williams
Organizations
- Naval War College