Another Voice Against Torture Policies
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Law, Military, The War On TerrorismI just found an interesting article in this month’s New Yorker about the former general counsel of the United States Navy, Alberto J. Mora:
“Never has there been a counsel with more intellectual courage or personal integrity,� David Brant, the former head of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, said. Brant added somewhat cryptically, “He surprised us into doing the right thing.� Conspicuous for his silence that night was Mora’s boss, William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Department of Defense.Back in Haynes’s office, on the third floor of the Pentagon, there was a stack of papers chronicling a private battle that Mora had waged against Haynes and other top Administration officials, challenging their tactics in fighting terrorism. Some of the documents are classified and, despite repeated requests from members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, have not been released. One document, which is marked “secret� but is not classified, is a twenty-two-page memo written by Mora. It shows that three years ago Mora tried to halt what he saw as a disastrous and unlawful policy of authorizing cruelty toward terror suspects.
The memo is a chronological account, submitted on July 7, 2004, to Vice Admiral Albert Church, who led a Pentagon investigation into abuses at the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It reveals that Mora’s criticisms of Administration policy were unequivocal, wide-ranging, and persistent. Well before the exposure of prisoner abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, in April, 2004, Mora warned his superiors at the Pentagon about the consequences of President Bush’s decision, in February, 2002, to circumvent the Geneva conventions, which prohibit both torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.� He argued that a refusal to outlaw cruelty toward U.S.-held terrorist suspects was an implicit invitation to abuse. Mora also challenged the legal framework that the Bush Administration has constructed to justify an expansion of executive power, in matters ranging from interrogations to wiretapping. He described as “unlawful,� “dangerous,� and “erroneous� novel legal theories granting the President the right to authorize abuse. Mora warned that these precepts could leave U.S. personnel open to criminal prosecution.
Do read the whole thing, especially if you’re interested in the opinions of those on the inside who think that it’s a dangerous game the administration is playing with our credibility.
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February 21st, 2006 at 8:49 am
there’s more:
You would think this is all you would see on TV, but suspect this will be an inconsequential blip.
I would be interested in Denise’s take on this.