The investigations of Alberto Mora, the outgoing general counsel of the US Navy, into the Administration's torture policy and the actions he took are the subject of a long report in the New Yorker this week by Jane Mayer.
Jane Mayer, along with Seymour Hersh, has been one of the most effective investigative reporters going after the Bush administration over its policy to allow torture. Now she reports on the persistent efforts of one top-ranking Navy lawyer to end and what he has called "a moral and a legal tragedy."
Mora is referring specifically to the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions on detention policy. He has left the Navy after trying his damnedest to stop the Adminstration from breaking the law.
“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.
Mayer goes on to describe Mora's "unequivocal, wide-ranging, and persistent" efforts to change Administration's policy and his warnings that circumventing the Geneva conventions was an invitation for abuse.
Mora thinks that the media has focussed too narrowly on allegations of U.S.-sanctioned torture. As he sees it, the authorization of cruelty is equally pernicious. “To my mind, there’s no moral or practical distinction,” he told me. “If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America—even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It’s a transformative issue.”
The full story of Alberto Mora's investigation into cases of cruelty and torture sanctioned by the Bush administration and his efforts to change that policy, along with supporting documents, can be found in the February 27 New Yorker.
NB: The New York Times and the Washington Post are among many papers reporting on this story today.
