Haynes rarely discussed his alliance with Cheney's office, but his colleagues, as one of them told me, noticed that "stuff moved back and forth fast" between the two power centers. Haynes was not considered to be a particularly ideological thinker, but he was seen as "pliant," as one former Pentagon colleague put it, when it came to serving the agenda of Cheney and Addington.

Just a few months ago, Mora attended a meeting in Rumsfeld's private conference room at the Pentagon, called by Gordon England, the Deputy Defense Secretary, to discuss a proposed new directive defining the military's detention policy. The civilian Secretaries of the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy were present, along with the highest-ranking officers of each service, and some half-dozen military lawyers. Matthew Waxman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, had proposed making it official Pentagon policy to treat detainees in accordance with Common Article Three of the Geneva conventions, which bars cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, as well as outrages against human dignity.Going around the huge wooden conference table, where the officials sat in double rows, England asked for a consensus on whether the Pentagon should support Waxman's proposal. This standard had been in effect for fifty years, and all members of the U.S. armed services were trained to follow it. One by one, the military officers argued for returning the U.S. to what they called the high ground. But two people opposed it. One was Stephen Cambone, the under-secretary of defense for intelligence; the other was Haynes. They argued that the articulated standard would limit America's "flexibility." It also might expose Administration officials to charges of war crimes: if Common Article Three became the standard for treatment, then it might become a crime to violate it. Their opposition was enough to scuttle the proposal. In exasperation, according to another participant, Mora said that whether the Pentagon enshrined it as official policy or not, the Geneva conventions were already written into both U.S. and international law. Any grave breach of them, at home or abroad, was classified as a war crime. To emphasize his position, he took out a copy of the text of U.S. Code 18.2441, the War Crimes Act, which forbids the violation of Common Article Three, and read from it. The point, Mora told me, was that "it's a statute. It exists--we're not free to disregard it. We're bound by it. It's been adopted by the Congress. And we're not the only interpreters of it. Other nations could have U.S. officials arrested." Not long afterward, Waxman was summoned to a meeting at the White House with David Addington. Waxman declined to comment on the exchange, but, according to the Times, Addington berated him for arguing that the Geneva conventions should set the standard for detainee treatment. The U.S. needed maximum flexibility, Addington said. Since then, efforts to clarify U.S. detention policy have languished. In December, Waxman left the Pentagon for the State Department.

Do you support the establishment of a special investigative commission, with subpoena power, to determine why the abuse of prisoners by U.S. personnel became so widespread in Afghanistan and Iraq and who bears responsibility for such practices?

Seeking an exemption from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in order to enable the military to resume bombing on a remote Pacific island as part of live-fire training exercises, Haynes prepared a legal brief arguing that even though the island is an important nesting site for such migratory birds as great frigate birds, red-footed boobies and Pacific golden plovers, bird lovers should have no problem with the bombing. Indeed, argued the Haynes brief, conservationists would actually benefit from the destruction of such birds, because it makes the birds rarer - and "bird watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do spotting a common one." Moreover, Haynes noted, the bombing is good for the birds, too - because it keeps the island free of other "human intrusion." Somehow the Haynes logic did not fare well. A federal judge ruled against the military in 2002. The judge's decision included one particularly memorable line: "The Court hopes that the federal government will refrain from making such frivolous arguments in the future." [1]