On September 7, 2004, Hutson and seven other retired officers wrote an open letter to President Bush expressing their concern over the number of allegations of abuse of prisoners in U.S. military custody.

In it they wrote: We urge you to commit – immediately and publicly – to support the creation of a comprehensive, independent commission to investigate and report on the truth about all of these allegations, and to chart a course for how practices that violate the law should be addressed.

[5]In January 2005, Dean Hutson, along with Yale Law School dean Harold Koh, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to the appointment of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general of the United States, because of his alleged role in attempting to provide legal guidance to the U.S. military justifying abusive interrogation practices, including that the War on Terror "renders obsolete" and "renders quaint" aspects of the Geneva Conventions.

[7] Hutson testified before the Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee on July 14, 2005, offering his opinion on the detention of "unlawful combatants".

[8] On March 28, 2006, Hutson, and five other retired officers, called on US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to recuse himself from considering Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

[11] The Globe reported, at length, comments Hutson had made regarding a memo from Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon R. England telling Armed Forces personnel to comply with the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of captives: "It kind of takes the wind out of the sails of people who say the Congress should simply authorize what the president had done in his original order.

The Washington Post reports that Hutson commented on a draft bill from the Bush administration for new Guantanamo military commissions to replace those struck down by the US Supreme Court.