Quotes on Torture Alberto Mora

Alberto Mora
General Counsel, U.S. Navy

(2001-2006)

Alberto Mora was appointed general counsel for the United States Navy in 2001. One of Mora's great uncles had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp; another was tortured before he was hanged.
If the individual doesn't have the right to be free from torture and to enforce those rights, to some sort of judicial process, then individual rights cease to have significant meaning. The notion of rights become trivialized because if the right to be free from cruelty is not a right, then what else is left? Property rights, some types of free speech rights, these are important, but nothing is as important as the preservation of human dignity through freedom from cruelty.

One subscribes to the Geneva Convention because it makes enemy soldiers more likely to not resist capture than to resist capture. If an enemy soldier knows he'll be treated humanely if he's captured, he's not likely to fight to the last bullet. On the other hand, if an enemy soldier understands he's likely to be abused, then that increases his likelihood that he'll continue to fight and that American soldiers will be hurt or killed as a result. So there are a variety of factors that underlie the Geneva Convention and there's a large body of scholarship, all of which it is the principle domain of the JAGs to understand. 

When you saw the package of documents, you also saw Secretary Rumsfeld's signature, which shocked you, but you saw a handwritten note as well.

At the very bottom of the top page, Secretary Rumsfeld, in his handwriting, notes in reference to the request for authority to apply stress positions in standing for periods of time, something like, "Why are they limited to four hours a day? I stand at my desk from eight to ten hours a day."

...
if we were to apply cruelty now, it would necessarily imply a repeal and repudiation of our historic commitment to human rights as a foreign policy objective. Ever since World War II and arguably before then, the nation has been aggressively promoting human rights very successfully, successfully in the sense that it's altered other nations' and other individuals' behavior around the world. And all of this has been to the benefit of the United States and our long-term national security interests. And if we were now to allow the use of cruelty as a national policy, that was to say that other countries could also apply cruelty as a matter of their policy. It would repudiate all of the major human rights conventions that have been largely the result of American advocacy since World War II. How could we do that?