Retired Navy Attorney Alberto Mora Discusses U.S. Mistreatment of Detainees

Release date: April 03, 2008 |

While he was general counsel of the U.S. Navy, Alberto J. Mora waged a campaign inside the Bush administration to prevent policy sanctioning the mistreatment of detainees held as part of the war on terror. Mora will discuss the abusive interrogation methods used by U.S. military personnel and the high-level shifts in government policy that made these tactics common practice at “American Cruelty,” a lecture that will be held Thursday, April 3, at 8 p.m. in Goucher College’s Merrick Lecture Hall.

Mora is the 2008 visiting scholar of the Roxana Cannon Arsht Center for Ethics and Leadership at Goucher College. Due to widespread interest in this event, no more tickets will be available to the greater community. Students, faculty, and staff who want to attend should contact Goucher's box office at 410-337-6333 or boxoffice@goucher.edu as soon as possible.

After graduating with honors from Swarthmore College in 1974, Mora worked from 1975 to 1978 for the U.S. State Department as a foreign service officer at the embassy in Lisbon, Portugal. He left to enter law school at the University of Miami School of Law, where he received his J.D. in 1981. He worked in litigation at a number of firms, until President George H.W. Bush appointed him as general counsel to the United States Information Agency in 1989. He was later appointed three times by President Bill Clinton to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America and other U.S. information services.

In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Mora as the general counsel of the U.S. Navy, its most senior civilian lawyer. Mora was in the Pentagon during the September 11 terrorist attacks. As a loyal Republican, he strongly supported the Bush administration’s resulting war on terror, including the invasion of Iraq.

In December 2002, Mora was alerted by Navy investigators to reports that detainees held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were being subjected to cruel and unlawful interrogation practices that were the result of significant policy shifts at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Mora warned his superiors at the Pentagon about the consequences of President Bush’s February 2002 decision to circumvent the Geneva conventions, which prohibit both torture and humiliating and degrading treatment. He argued that a refusal to outlaw cruelty toward U.S.-held terrorist suspects was an implicit invitation for American military personnel to engage in the kind of torture that was later exposed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq.

He also vehemently challenged the legal framework that the Bush administration constructed to justify expanding its executive power, including new legal theories that granted the president the right to authorize abuse. Mora warned that these precepts would carry grave political consequences for the United States and could expose U.S. interrogators and policymakers to criminal prosecution.

Following Mora’s persistent three-year campaign to end the military’s cruel and inhumane interrogation methods, the Abu Ghraib abuses were exposed; Justice Department memoranda justifying cruelty and torture have been rescinded; the authorizations for the application of extreme interrogation techniques have been withdrawn; and the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibits cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, has been enacted.

For his moral courage and his commitment to upholding American values, Mora was honored with the 2006 Profile in Courage Award by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

Mora retired from the Navy in January 2006. He has since become the chief counsel for Wal-Mart’s international division.

Supported by a $2 million gift from Adrienne Arsht, the Roxana Cannon Arsht Center for Ethics and Leadership explores ethics and leadership across a range of liberal-arts disciplines. The center brings noted scholars to Goucher’s campus for one- to two-year residencies and holds a biennial symposium that features renowned ethicists and authorities in the field of leadership studies.