by TChris

A number of military lawyers have objected to the Bush administration's aggressive use of coercive techniques to interrogate detainees. The administration, of course, refused to listen. It continued a policy of cruel mistreatment while assuring the public that detainees were all treated humanely.

Writing in the New Yorker, Jane Mayer tells the story of Alberto Mora's effort to persuade the Pentagon to obey the law. As general counsel of the Navy, Mora challenged the administration's "disastrous and unlawful policy of authorizing cruelty toward terror suspects." Crucial to the story is a 22 page memo (pdf) marked "secret."

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.