Senior Pentagon lawyer wrote DoD officials could be prosecuted for torture

One of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution, a newly disclosed document shows. The lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, a political appointee who retired on Dec. 31 after more than four years as general counsel of the Navy, was one of many dissenters inside the Pentagon. Senior uniformed lawyers in all the military services also objected sharply to the interrogation policy, according to internal documents declassified last year. But Mora's campaign against what he viewed as an official policy of cruel treatment, detailed in a memorandum he wrote in July 2004 and recounted in an article in the Feb. 27 issue of the New Yorker magazine underscored again how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject. Current and former Defense Department officials said that part of what was striking about Mora's forceful role in the internal debates was how out of character it seemed: a loyal Republican, he was known as a supporter of President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the fight against terrorism. Mora prepared the 22-page memorandum for a Defense Department review of interrogation operations that was conducted by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, after the scandal involving treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The document focused on Mora's successful opposition to the coercive techniques that Rumsfeld approved for interrogators at Guantánamo Bay on Dec. 2, 2002, and Mora's subsequent, failed effort to influence the legal discussions that led to new methods approved by Rumsfeld the following April.