Editor,
In his American revolutionary history, Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis styles the domestic political landscape in 1804 "a dangerously fluid place," where national laws and institutions remained in flux. "Eventually," writes Ellis, "the United States might develop into a nation of laws and established institutions capable of surviving corrupt or incompetent public officials, but it was not there yet. It still required honorable and virtuous leaders to survive."
Ex-Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora's foiled attempts to prevent the torture of Guantanamo detainees, described in the New Yorker and elsewhere, raise the question of whether Ellis' hopeful implication is correct. That is, can any democratic republic ever attain a kind of institutional-ethical critical mass, after which point corrupt or incompetent government officials can no longer endanger its viability? Mora's struggle in vain against the president's men, the growing disaffection of the American people with their own government and the nation's declining prestige in the international community suggest otherwise.
Mora rejects the Bush administration's scuttling of United States federal and international law precisely because the substance and structure of American constitutional government cannot be neatly separated from core American values.
Mora's courageous and patriotic stance thus reveals the president's attempts to cloak his illegal and immoral actions in constitutional authority and geopolitical exigency for what they are - an insult to the institutional and ideological foundations of this country, and a threat to the future of the republic as grave as the specter of another al-Qaida attack.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Joel Young
UNM student
