Dunlavey was the sole commander of JTF 170, a unit created to interrogate individuals held in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, in Cuba.
Generals Lehnert and Baccus commanded Joint Task Force 160, a unit created to handle the detention of individuals held in Guantanamo.
According to a 11 September 2011, profile in the Erie Times-News, a local paper, Dunlavey has defended the use of these controversial interrogation techniques.
In a previous interview with the Erie-Times News, he said that detainees at Guantanamo were "not prisoners of war the way we were trained for, or the (kind the) Geneva Convention envisions."
[14][15] Dunlavey had been undergoing treatment for after-effects of his service during the 1991 Gulf War since 2002, and had been diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2011.