[kyudowind]

"One night this January, in a ceremony at the Officers’ Club at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia ... Alberto J. Mora, the outgoing general counsel of the United States Navy, stood next to a podium in the club’s ballroom."

"'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 ..."

"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 ..."

"Mora said that he did not fear reprisal for stating his opposition to the Administration’s emerging policy. 'It never crossed my mind,' he said. 'Besides, my mother would have killed me if I hadn’t spoken up. No Hungarian after Communism, or Cuban after Castro, is not aware that human rights are incompatible with cruelty.' He added, 'The debate here isn’t only how to protect the country. It’s how to protect our values.'" (Italics mine.)

"On January 15th [2003], Mora took a step guaranteed to antagonize Haynes, who frequently warned subordinates to put nothing controversial in writing or in e-mail messages. Mora delivered an unsigned draft memo to Haynes, and said that he planned to 'sign it out' that afternoon—making it an official document—unless the harsh interrogation techniques were suspended ..." (Italics mine.)

"On April 28, 2004 ... the first pictures from Abu Ghraib became public. Mora said, 'I felt saddened and dismayed. Everything we had warned against in Guantánamo had happened—but in a different setting. I was stunned.'"

"To date, no charges have been brought against U.S. personnel in Guantánamo. The senior Defense Department official I spoke to affirmed that, in the Pentagon’s view, Qahtani’s interrogation was 'within the bounds.' Elsewhere in the world, as Mora predicted, the controversy is growing ..."

Jane Mayer, "The Memo: How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted." (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060227fa_fact), The New Yorker, February 27, 2006 (online February 20, 2006)

The Mora Memo (PDF - 1.4 MB): “Statement for the Record: Office of General Counsel Involvement in Interrogation Issues.” (http://www.newyorker.com/images/pdfs/moramemo.pdf)

Enjoy

[Jane of Arc]

kyudowind,

WOW! Excellent post! It simply blows my mind that even one American can still support these complete thugs!

[BenDover]

Ironically, we have become exactly like those we claim to despise.

Thanks for the info....

[JamesP]

To know there are still good men willing to do the right thing despite the risks, self-serving culture and secretive, intimidating environment created by this administration is heartening.

[JamesP]

From Dahr Jamil on Truthout.org:

While President Bush has regularly claimed - as with reporters in Panama last November - that "we do not torture," Janis Karpinski, the U.S. Brigadier General whose 800th Military Police Brigade was in charge of 17 prison facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib back in 2003, begs to differ. She knows that we do torture and she believes that the President himself is most likely implicated in the decision to embed torture in basic war-on-terror policy.

While testifying this January 21 in New York City at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, Karpinski told us: "General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq] himself signed the eight-page memorandum authorizing literally a laundry list of harsher techniques in interrogations to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific permission."

All this, as she reminded us, came after Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been "specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to Guantanamo Bay and run the interrogations operation," was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration to "work with the military intelligence personnel to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques."

Karpinski met Miller on his tour of American prison facilities in Iraq in the fall of 2003. Miller, as she related in her testimony, told her, "It is my opinion that you are treating the prisoners too well. At Guantanamo Bay, the prisoners know that we are in charge and they know that from the very beginning. You have to treat the prisoners like dogs. And if they think or feel any differently you have effectively lost control of the interrogation."

Miller went on to tell Karpinksi in reference to Abu Ghraib, "We're going to Gitmo-ize the operation."

When she later asked for an explanation, Karpinski was told that the military police guarding the prisons were following the orders in a memorandum approving "harsher interrogation techniques," and, according to Karpinski, "signed by the Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld."