In Search of Political Courage

The question, it seems to us, is:

Is there a rule of law anymore, or are we fools just abiding by what we think is the rule of law, while our own governmet shelved it all in 2001?

In Search of Political Courage:

"It takes a lot of courage these days for a government official to stand up for the rule of law.

On Dec. 17, 2002, Alberto Mora received information from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service that prisoners at the Guantanamo Naval Base were being abusively interrogated. Mora, a loyal conservative, had been appointed by President Bush in 2001 to serve as general counsel of the Navy. Since the Navy had no responsibility for Guantanamo interrogations, Mora could have referred the report to others in the Pentagon, or simply decided to ignore it. Instead, he chose to investigate. What he discovered was deeply disturbing.

As he wrote in a recently declassified memo to the Navy's inspector general, Mora learned that his boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had authorized interrogation techniques that ''could rise to the level of torture.' Mora told the Pentagon's general counsel, William Haynes, that Rumsfeld's memorandum ''could have severe ramifications unless the policy was quickly reversed.' He warned that the interrogation policy was ''unlawful' and that its consequences could be ''incalculably harmful to US foreign, military, and legal policies.'

When nothing happened, Mora set out to change the policy. He knew he had to find allies in the Pentagon, and he began to recruit them by openly debating the Rumsfeld memorandum with other officials. A small bureaucratic victory came when the Department of Defense created a ''Working Group' to develop new recommendations. But this process was overwhelmed by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which weighed in with its own memo expanding the original Rumsfeld policy. "