Further to yesterday’s item on Alberto Mora, here are links to Jane Mayer’s article in The New Yorker (these links tend to be perishable), and to the full text of the Mora memo. The Mayer article gives great detail of Mora’s heroic, but unsuccessful, attempts to prevent Cheney’s retainers from dragging us into the muck.
One of the most amazing revelations from the Mayer story is that Mora was part of a working group of DoD lawyers who objected to the torture policy; they were thus removed from the loop. While they thought their objections had stopped the policy going forward, in fact a report approving it was issued in the name of the working group they had been cut out of.
Legal critics within the Administration had been allowed to think that they were engaged in a meaningful process; but their deliberations appeared to have been largely an academic exercise, or, worse, a charade. “It seems that there was a two-track program here, said Martin Lederman, a former lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel, who is now a visiting professor at Georgetown. “Otherwise, why would they share the final working-group report with Hill and Miller but not with the lawyers who were its ostensible authors?”
But read the whole Mayer article. Yes, it’s amazing how bad things have gotten. Even so, I refuse to be amazed that good people stood up against it — I’ll just be proud.
