I haven't been able to get a copy of the New Yorker's forthcoming story on resistance within the armed services to the Bush-Cheney policy of torturing and abusing detainees. But the fact that the Navy's general counsel warned before the new policy was instigated of its potential for facilitating abuse strikes me as enormously important. Money quote from the AP:
"The memo from July 7, 2004, recounted [Navy general counsel Alberto J.] Mora’s 2 1/2-year effort to halt a policy that he feared would authorize cruelty toward suspected terrorists.
The document also indicates that some lawyers in the Justice and Defense departments objected to the legal course the administration undertook, according to the report.
Mora said Navy intelligence officers reported in 2002 that military-intelligence interrogators at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were engaging in escalating levels of physical and psychological abuse rumored to have been authorized at a high level in Washington.
'I was appalled by the whole thing,' Mora told the magazine. 'It was clearly abusive and it was clearly contrary to everything we were ever taught about American values.'
Mora said he thought his concerns were being addressed by a special group set up by the Pentagon. But he discovered in January 2003 that a Justice Department opinion had negated his arguments with what he described as 'an extreme and virtually unlimited theory of the extent of the president’s commander in chief authority.'"