The current despicable (and stupid) moves by the Bush administration to legalise and and justify torture as a tool in the "War on Terror" reminded me that I wanted to pay tribute to an American military man that most of you have probably not heard of.

At this blog we are lucky enough to have first hand contact with people like General Clark, Admiral Sestak and Commander Massa -- just to name a few military men who take their duty to stand up for what they believe in seriously -- even if it means making powerful enemies.

Major Michael Mori is another cut from the same cloth. And, in many ways, the risk he has taken in making powerful enemies is more extreme -- because he's still in the US armed forces. Worse still, from his point of view, I fear his efforts are barely even registering in the US, even though he's becoming quite a cult hero in Australia.

What Major Michael Mori is doing is defending the Australian David Hicks who's been held now for more than four years at Guatanamo Bay. Defending Hicks isn't easy because so far there's been no trial, and the system that's being proposed to try him, is rigged. That's exactly how Major Mori describes the Bush administration's "military commissions."

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: What you found out was, the people that created the system are the same people that were responsible for fighting the war in Afghanistan, setting up and choosing Guantanamo as the detention centre, approving interrogation techniques and being in charge of the interrogations that were going. So what you was a system of, sort of like, the investigators and the gaolers also being in charge of the supposed trial system. There was no independent check and balance on it. Unfortunately they needed to set up a system that would justify what they had already done.

Mori was, until he was assigned to the Hicks case, the chief prosecutor at a US military base in Hawaii. In this recent interview on Australian TV Major Mori, who has an almost goofy, innocent charm, admitted he thought when he was offered the job of defending Gitmo detainees, that he'd be dealing with major war criminals.

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: ... you know, I got the case and I kind of felt, "Well wait a minute." For a year or so I'd heard all this propaganda about the worst of the worst and I saw the file and I'm like, "Wait a minute. I'm getting ripped off here," you know, "Where is the worst of the worst?"

In same interview, (on a show that has a very similar comedic tone to a Daily Show interview) Mori described the way Hicks has been treated by his American captors.

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: You pretty much see the cell right there. It's just a cement room. He's in his cell until they wake him up to give him his morning meal. He gets his noon meal and his dinner meal. Sometime during the day, maybe during daylight hours, he'll be offered an opportunity for an hour to go out to a large, you know, chain link fence, pen, to have an hour of exercise. Besides that, he sits in his cell. When I last saw him he was allowed to have three books, and once a week they came around with a cart and gave him one book a week.

ANDREW DENTON: I know you tried to arrange books for him. What sort of books?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Yes, we've been bringing him books. There is a lot of things we try to do, obviously, to get David to focus away from where he was just sitting there in life. So we brought him a lot of books to read. Some got through, some didn't get through. They wouldn't let us give him 'Presumed Innocent', I'm not sure why. 'To Kill a Mockingbird Bird, 'The Fatal Shore' never got to him, but we've been able to give him a lot of Charles Dickens. He likes Charles Dickens.

ANDREW DENTON: He's spent a considerable period of time not just in isolation, but in isolation without sunlight. Is that correct?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: What does that do to a person?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: It's not very healthy, psychologically, for them. Just that whole, sort of, depriving someone of the basic stimuli. When I saw him, that really was all he could focus on, was trying to get out. We worked, and the Australian Consular was very helpful, in Washington DC, in getting that change and in getting him out of isolation. That's why I don't understand, now that the US has put him back in isolation, why they're accepting it now, when it was not tolerable a year or so ago.

ANDREW DENTON: How long was he in those conditions with no sunlight?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Eight months.

ANDREW DENTON: How much contact has he had with his family and with his children?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Well that was another thing. By him finally getting access to lawyers, we could actually try to be a conduit of getting mail and bringing it down and turning it in to be screened down there. They screen all his mail going in, his mail coming out. He might get a letter from his family that the words - his little niece has 'blank' many teeth now.

ANDREW DENTON: Really?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: Is it true, as I have read, that references to the word 'love' have been edited out of his mail?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Yes, yes.

ANDREW DENTON: What is the point of that?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: I don't know. These are a lot of good questions for the US that are running the camp. Some things, you can understand why they might want to screen it. That's fine, that happens in all prison systems. But why they black it out and redact accident things, it's hard to know.

ANDREW DENTON: Terry Hicks, his dad, alleges that at different times David has been beaten and that he's had objects inserted in his anus. Are you aware of anything like that?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: That has happened?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: Those have happened? Do you believe that he's been subjected to torture?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: I believe he's been mistreated and physically assaulted, and, through my investigation, I've confirmed it. What's interesting, it came out and became an issue with the Australian Government, and they of course, are only relying on the assurances by the US administration. I'll give you an example, because they conducted an investigation. One of the allegations was that David was with a group of other detainees that were taken from a ship to a piece of land, they were hooded and bound at the time, and that they were randomly beaten. So then they conducted their investigation and spoke to other detainees that were there that had been beaten as well and said, "I was hit," as well. But that didn't support David's story because they were hooded and they could not see David being beaten. You see, they can always try to find some way to support that doesn't confirm what happened. Any logical person would say that if five people go out and all five people say they were hit at this time, that that supports that.

I know there's talk from time to time on this blog about how lefties have trouble accepting military men as upholders of the kind of rights they (the left) believe in.

But Mori has really won over some of the cynics in Australia:

This from Mike Carlton one of the few left leaning columnists in the Sydney Morning Herald:

THE crusading lawyer is more a creature of film and fiction than a matter of fact. Think Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird or, more recently, Tom Cruise as Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee in A Few Good Men.

But the species does exist for real. This week, at the invitation of the NSW Attorney-General, Bob Debus, I had a social drink with Michael Mori, the US Marine Corps major who is defence counsel for the wretched David Hicks, our man in Guantanamo Bay.

I don't mind admitting that he blew my cynical socks off. He was erudite and energetic and, most surprising of all, blessed with a wicked sense of humour. It cannot be a good career move for a mere major to take on the legal might of the Pentagon and his commander-in-chief, but Mori is unswervingly dedicated to getting Hicks a fair trial or, better still, out of Gitmo scot-free.

For all its braying about freedom and justice, the Bush Administration has trashed those core American values without compunction, at enormous cost to the nation's reputation.

Meeting Michael Mori gives you real hope that not all is lost, that the good and true America is still out there.

Major Mori also made a big impression recently on members of the Sydney legal profession speaking at the University of New South Wales: It was an extraordinary occasion.

The senior vice-president of the Bar Association, Anna Katzmann SC, invited the common room audience to thank a visiting US Marine for his poised, informative seminar on Guantanamo Bay detainee, David Hicks. More than 400 members of Sydney's legal profession, solicitors, barristers and judges, responded with a standing ovation for Major Michael Mori. There was just the slightest hint of embarrassment on his face at the collective show of appreciation.

He shouldn't have been surprised. In the preceding hour, Mori delivered a wide-ranging talk that began with an overview of the origins and development of US military commissions. He summarised the laws of war and the specious arguments used by the US Defense Department as it tried to apply them to ‘unprivileged combatants' captured in Afghanistan. He ended with a briefing on the US Supreme Court's decision in the case of Hamdan and Congressional moves to legislate on new procedures for the military commissions. Mori suggested that, had military lawyers been consulted earlier in the process, the process established to try the Guantanamo Bay detainees would not have been so seriously flawed.

But, I'd like to finish this blog with more words from Major Mori himself from the TV interview transcript (link above) that show his compassion and his honesty.

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: When I see David and I'm down there and I see - he has more in common with the Alabama National Guardsmen outside his cell than the guy locked up next to him. David doesn't hate Americans. He doesn't, you know.

ANDREW DENTON: Do you believe that there is any chance at all he can get a fair trial in America?

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: If they use the US court martial system he'd get a fair trial. If they allowed the system to run like it should have, having the independent judiciary pick the judges and getting away from the Department of Defence General Council office controlling every aspect of it.

ANDREW DENTON: But you've said that because this is a political thing, the chances of that happening are very small.

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: It's very difficult. I mean especially - you're talking four and a half years later, let alone - I mean that time - justice delayed is justice denied. Can you give someone a fair trial five years after the events? Is it even possible?

ANDREW DENTON: You have been far from quiet about this. I'm assuming your next posting will be somewhere to the Arctic Circle.

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: I hope not.

ANDREW DENTON: That's what everybody wants to know that I talk to. Whenever your name comes up they go, "Wow, that guy's killed his career."

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: I don't know. You know, I've been a defence counsel before and it's just not something you worry about.

ANDREW DENTON: Yes, but you've said it very clearly, this is not your normal case, not your normal circumstance. You have been very, very vocal and critical of the administration of the US Government and, less importantly to you, this government, amongst others.

MAJOR MICHAEL MORI: I don't see I'm being very critical. I see myself as being very close to the middle where everything is supposed to be, equality, due process. I just think the administration and the other side, in a way, has departed so far to the extreme away from our basic values that it appears like I'm saying - I don't think anything I'm saying, give someone a fair trial, is some novel idea or radical idea. I hope not, you know. I'm not worried about it. There is nothing I can do except do my job the best I can and represent David and have the values and the core values that the Marine Corps have taught me of justice and judgment and integrity.

I'd really love for CCN bloggers to show Major Mori some admiration and encouragement because he is a shining example of what the military can be. Anyone have any ideas? Anyone with US Marine contacts know how we could get an email address?

I know Major Mori would like the attention to go to getting fair treatment for David Hicks rather than for himself -- I'd like both because I know how savage this administration can be on those who stand in its way.