Dear Colonel Mori,
As a lieutenant colonel in the United States Marine Corps (USMC), you belong to the toughest military corps in the world and none of the “jarheads” could be suspected of being unpatriotic: they are all raised on a diet of “semper fi” (semper fidelis).
You turned up at the gate of Parris Island Marine Recruit Depot some day in 1983, then an 18 year old kid. You went through boot camp, spent several years as an enlisted man – the lowest place in the USMC food chain – but the Corpssensed talent and it sent you to Norwich University.
You graduated, became an officer and in 1994 they put you throughlaw school in Massachusetts. Again, you made it. You applied to the Bar and became a USMC advocate.
Bad timing for a few years later, America started grabbingforeign terrorists and flying them to Guantanamo (“Gizmo”) in utter secrecy. President Bush labeled them “enemy combatants” so they would be neither ordinary defendants with habeas corpus rights nor shielded by the Geneva conventions.
Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld claimed that was the only way to deal with the rascals. Bush’s Attorney general, a fellow named Alberto Gonzales, wrote an infamous memo holding the view that roughing them up was admissible and that water boarding is actually not a form of torture.
May be they should have tried it on Gonzales. Vice-President Dick Cheney never missed a chance to advocate the most muscular methods possible. In the name of patriotismBush and his lackeys were making a mockery of everything your country has always stood for.
To keep the world from figuring out that most of the folks in Gizmo could never be found guilty in an ordinary court of law, Bush came up with a plot to try them in front of “Military Commissions”, which he created by Presidential order in late 2001.
The idea, of course, was that the bad guys – most of them really were very bad guys indeed – would be swiftly processed in front of some docile military magistrates who could be relied upon to meet harsh sentences to people trying to terrorize America and blow up its cities.
That was when you and a few other lawyers came in. You defended these people. You invoked all possible legal defenses, objected to everything, literally raising hell in front of some astonished and sometimes angry military courts; you filed appeals, motions, constitutional objections and what not.
Among other “nice fellows” you represented was David Hicks, also known as MuhammedDawood, an Australian Muslim convert captured in Afghanistan in 2001 and sold – yes, for 1’000 dollars - to US forces, who flew him to Guantanamo.
Hicks was on his way to a life sentence if not worse. Today he is a free man and he has Michael Mori to thank. You paid the price of that defense by being passed over for promotion for years.
I was thinking of you some days ago because François Longchamp, the former President of the Geneva government – a narrow minded little local guy of no importance – was blasting me all over the place for representing Hannibal Kaddafi in Swiss courts. As I happen to be an officer too – a major in military justice, like you in 2007 - and a former Swiss MP, Longchampopined that it was “indecent” and similar nonsense.
Of course, Geneva is no “Gizmo” at all - no one would think of treating detainees that way here - andLongchamp is to Dick Cheney what a rusty bike is to an FA-18.
Yet the bias is the same: obnoxious, self-righteous people believing they have a mission and know what is right,forget how important it is for lawyersto put their foot down against their own country when necessary to uphold the principle that if a court system does not give the worst litigants the best possible defense, it is not worthy of the countries you and I love.
You are now a military judge and I hear they call you Dan. Well, Dan, the next time I come over, I might ask you to share a couple of beers because it looks like webothfeel the same way aboutsome of them things…...
Tags: Lettre ouverte, Charles Poncet, Michael Mori, 
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