Blog of law articles

UM Law grad and former Greenberg attorney Alberto Mora gets the love in this great profile:

Though he now lives in a red-brick mini-mansion down a silent, frostbitten cul-de-sac in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., Alberto Mora is at heart a Miami Cuban. Among the clues are a voracious appetite for debate and the Bustelo espresso he brews for visitors to his sparsely decorated home.

And until recently, you could tell by his politics. When U.S. soldiers invaded Iraq in 2003, he was general counsel for the U.S. Navy, the equivalent of a four-star general. He was a die-hard right-winger who had earned appointments to both Bush administrations.

But this past fall, he voted for Barack Obama.

A pivotal reason: He found the Bush administration’s inattention to human rights law “offensive . . . I’m elated and hopeful,” he says during an interview at his home two days before the inauguration, “that this new administration will lead other countries in establishing global prisoner-treatment guidelines that are even more stringent than those in effect before Bush mangled them.”

You could say this is Mora’s thing. Perhaps more than any other American, he’s responsible for turning the tide on prisoner abuse at Guantánamo Bay. For two years, with memos and heavyweight legal arguments, he waged a quietly vicious inner-Pentagon campaign to stop the torture.

“Mora’s an American hero,” says Michael Gelles, a Navy psychologist who also helped bring prisoner abuse to light. “He created a debate that led to a full reversal.”

Hey, General Counsel for the Navy?

That position sounds familiar....I wonder if the person who eventually succeeded Mora similarly fought just as hard, and put his career on the line, to stop prisoner abuse at Gitmo?