An unsung hero, a *real* USA Patriot

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: An unsung hero, a *real* USA Patriot
Date: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 16:10:28 -0500
From: Jeff Nye <jpn () users sourceforge net>
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060227fa_fact

THE MEMO
by JANE MAYER
How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was
thwarted.
Issue of 2006-02-27
Posted 2006-02-20

One night this January, in a ceremony at the Officers’ Club at Fort
Myer, in Arlington, Virginia, which sits on a hill with a commanding
view across the Potomac River to the Washington Monument, Alberto J.
Mora, the outgoing general counsel of the United States Navy, stood next
to a podium in the club’s ballroom. A handsome gray-haired man in his
mid-fifties, he listened with a mixture of embarrassment and pride as
his colleagues toasted his impending departure. Amid the usual tributes
were some more pointed comments.

“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.

[...]

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