Mora, Alberto - short clip - AmericanLeadershipOnHumanRights

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-	The country made a whole host of wrong decisions	0:00
	during the Bush administration.	0:04
	I was a member of that decision,	0:06
	of that administration, rather.	0:07
	I wish I could have done more.	0:09
	Now, on the other hand,	0:10
	I take a great deal of satisfaction in the fact	0:13
	that on the interrogation,	0:15
	from the first moment I heard about this,	0:17
	I literally, every single day I was acting on this.	0:19
	There was not, I take pride in the fact there was not a day	0:21
	that went by until the the Guantanamo authorizations	0:25
	were reversed that I didn't do something	0:29
	to advance, advance that.	0:31
	And given what I was doing,	0:37
	and the nature of my responsibilities,	0:39
	I had neither the information,	0:44
	nor indications from other sources	0:45
	that there was a more systemic kind of problem	0:47
	that that was afoot.	0:50
	In retrospect, was I naive?	0:53
	Did I see only a small part of the picture,	0:55
	and understand only small part of the problem?	0:58
	Absolutely, absolutely.	1:01
	President Bush has just issued his memoirs, partial memoirs.	1:04
	He takes pride in authorizing waterboarding,	1:08
	a technique that has been regarded	1:11
	as classic torture for centuries.	1:12
	It's, it's, it remains to me a source of astonishment	1:16
	that, that this should be so.	1:23
	And it's, astonishment and sadness	1:25
	because it's, it's all to the, the debate.	1:31
	There will be other terrorist attacks.	1:33
	We all understand that.	1:36
	And even now half the American people believe	1:39
	that the application of torture is perfectly okay	1:41
	if it could keep us safer.	1:47
	And so we we've altered and broken the national consensus	1:49
	on the application of cruelty to individuals.	1:53
	We've altered the understanding	1:54
	and the definition of American values.	1:57
	And if we continue on this path,	2:00
	we're gonna change our current constitution.	2:02
	And, which is what identifies us as a country	2:07
	in ways that in another era,	2:10
	would have been regarded as un-American,	2:12
	as profoundly contrary	2:15
	to our deepest nature and core identity.	2:16
	And I've indicated to you	2:21
	some of the international consequences,	2:23
	the, the application of torture had negative consequences,	2:26
	operationally in the War on Terror.	2:30
	It made us less safe, not more safe.	2:31
	It may be that we got some actionable intelligence	2:34
	from some of the detainees, but are the, the, the impact,	2:36
	the negative, the destructive consequences it had	2:40
	on our ability to maintain and expand.	2:43
	The Alliance of nature, of Nations had fought together	2:45
	behind a, a unified set of goals	2:49
	in the war on terror was, was shattered.	2:51
	The international consensus on human rights is shattered.	2:55
	American leadership on human rights is gone.	3:01
	We may try to regain some of it.	3:08
	President Obama has made some headway	3:10
	but the, the nation's identification with cruelty,	3:13
	to give you one example, and less than due process	3:17
	to the Guantanamo detainees and other detainees	3:21
	has affected international confidence	3:24
	in, in the United States and the values we subscribe to.	3:28
	And that's impaired our ability to lead internationally	3:32
	on these, these areas.	3:36
	If we can't lead on human rights	3:37
	then we become another country.	3:40
	It's we, we lose the exceptionalism	3:42
	that so many in the country rightfully take pride in.	3:47

Item Info

Title:

Mora, Alberto - short clip - AmericanLeadershipOnHumanRights

Date:

December 4, 2010

Interviewer:

Honigsberg, Peter Jan

Interviewee:

Mora, Alberto

Role:

Military

Description:

This interview may include descriptions of violence.
Navy General Counsel
Alberto Mora, male, age 58, was the General Counsel of the Navy in 2001 and led efforts in the Department of Defense to oppose Bush administration legal theories that allowed harsh interrogation tactics at the U.S. detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Description was provided by Witness to Guantanamo.

Subject:

Format:

oral histories

Language:

English

Extent:

2:35:11

Digital Collection:

Witness to Guantanamo

Source Collection:

Witness to Guantanamo Video Collection, 2009-2017

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Rights Note:

Unless otherwise noted, copyright is held by Peter Hongisberg. Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license, you are free to use and share these materials subject to the following conditions: You must attribute Peter Hongisberg as the rights holder. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. You may not distribute any modifications to the materials. For other uses, including commercial uses, please contact Rubenstein Library at http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/ask.

Identifier:

6bbd4123a46f1922dfd0b1182aec432c
witnesstoguantanamo
ark:/87924/r4sf2tx4d
edf0b29c-34cf-4c72-b53b-034f7ca0b1a2

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4sf2tx4d

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Mora, Alberto - short clip - AmericanLeadershipOnHumanRights

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