The New Yorker magazine has revealed that two years before the Abu Ghraib photos were first published, the Navy’s general counsel, Alberto Mora, began challenging what he described as the administration’s “disastrous and unlawful policy of authorizing cruelty toward terror suspects.” Mora warned his superiors at the Pentagon about the consequences of President Bush’s decision, in 2002, to circumvent the Geneva Conventions. He argued that a refusal to outlaw cruelty toward U.S.-held detainees was an implicit invitation to abuse. Mora also challenged the legal framework that the Bush administration has constructed to justify an expansion of executive power, in matters ranging from interrogations to wiretapping. He described the novel legal theories granting the president the right to authorize abuse as “unlawful,” “dangerous” and “erroneous.”