Today, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on detainee interrogation. Testifying before the committee, former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora, who battled within the Pentagon to shut down the use of torture, blasted the Bush administration’s abusive detention practices as leading to the recruitment of new radicals and the deaths of more American soldiers:
[T]here are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Watch it:
Mora denounced the Bush adminsitration’s “decision to use so-called ‘harsh’ interrogation techniques” as “a mistake of massive proportions.”