Since my copy of the New Yorker always arrives about four days late (I like to think I have the best read postman in Brooklyn; my copy of the Atlantic takes ages to get here) I only just finished Jane Mayer’s jaw-dropping account in the 2.27 issue of Navy general counsel Alberto Mora. In case you missed the headlines the story spawned — and there should have been more but the press got swept up in the story of Tom and Katie’s problems — Mora left the Navy after writing an internal memo exposing and denouncing the Bush administration’s policy of torture, the tacit and sometimes explicit permission it has handed down to torture prisoners in the ongoing, neverending war on terror, particularly those prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

It’s a classic story of one man’s outrage in the face of moral decay and one more on the right should heed (most people on the left don’t seem to need convincing that torture is a bad thing and shouldn’t be practiced by the US). Mora is the son of parents who came from old Communist regimes (Cuba, Hungary) and had moral as well as practical objections to the advocacy of torture: how can we fight bad buys if we are doing the same things we accuse them of? “I was appalled by he whole thing,” he said of discovering the then secret policy documents (written by then WH counsel Alberto Gonzalez and admin lawyer John Yoo) that justified torturing terrorists on the basis of ticking-bomb scenarios (which Israel has used to justify torture for years and is a favorite gag in Fox TV’s 24) and the big trump card of the Patriot Act and the powers Bush believes he has to do anything in the wake of 9.11. Read the story, see if you have some outrage left.

And though Secretary of Torture Donald Rumsfeld comes off as a dependable, almost Dickensian villain (he liked to joke that forcing prisoners to stand all day was not torture because he stood in his office all day at work) and VP Cheney is an equally reliable shadow over everything — think of that big black eye in Lord of the Rings — I was left wondering about the good Christian people who blindly defend this adminstration and its policies. As I often do in such cases, I go back to Dostoevski and wonder: in what scenario would Jesus give his blessing to the torture of men? Even villainous terrorists opposed to your religion, not to mention your way of life and your right to watch 24, which is so much better on Tivo so you can zip past all the ads, so each hour in Jack Bauer’s bad bad day is only 45 minutes, sort of like being at the shrink’s…

Mora questioned one of his superiors on a technique Rummy signed off on, the “deprivation of light and auditory stimuli” — what did that mean? “Could a prisoner be locked in a completely dark cell? If so could he be kept there a month? Longer? Until he went blind? What precisely did the authority to exploit phobias permit? Could a detainee be held in a coffin? What about using dogs? Rats? How far could an interrogator push this? Until a man went insane?” The biggest exploiters of rat phobias, of course, are the agents of the government in Orwell’s 1984 but nowhere outside of a class taught by Joe Stalin in the inner circles of hell is that book held up as a teaching tool for domestic security. It is time for those who call themselves Christians and support this administration to start asking, again, what Jesus not Jack Bauer would do.