Human Rights First (HRF), a 25-year-old lawyers’ group, said record-keeping of detainee deaths, of which Pentagon has reported 108 since 2002, has been “grossly inadequate” and that criminal investigators have routinely failed to interview key witnesses or collect and maintain usable evidence, such as body parts or basic ballistics evidence, for possible prosecution.

In addition, commanders have often either repeated failed to even to report deaths of detainees in the custody of their command, or delayed reporting them for days or even weeks after they occurred, greatly complicating efforts to collect relevant evidence. In one case, a death of an Iraqi detainee was not reported until a year later, and the case was closed without any determination of the cause of death.