He led an effort within the Defense Department to oppose the legal theories of John Yoo and to try to end the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay.

His father, a medical doctor and professor, is Cuban, and his mother's parents are from Hungary, which they fled in advance of active Hungarian-German cooperation in 1941.

He was later appointed three times by President Bill Clinton to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America and other U.S. information services.

"[5] In December 2002, Mora received word from David Brant, director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), that NCIS agents at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba had learned that detainees being held there were being subjected to "physical abuse and degrading treatment" by members of the Joint Task Force 170 (JTF-170), and that authorization for this treatment had come from "a 'high level' in Washington".

Mora described his reaction to learning of the authorization for coercive interrogation techniques in these words: To my mind, there's no moral or practical distinction [between cruelty and torture].

In the following weeks, Mora actively argued with a large number of the most senior lawyers and officials of the military and the Defense Department that the interrogation techniques that had been approved were unlawful.

On January 15, 2003, he received word from William Haynes, the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, that Rumsfeld would be suspending the authority for the extraordinary interrogation techniques later that day.

Two days later, Rumsfeld directed Haynes to establish a Working Group to develop a new set of guidelines for interrogation techniques, headed by Mary L. Walker, General Counsel of the Air Force.

With Walker's encouragement to share his views, he circulated an opposing draft memo, entitled "Proposed Alternative Approach to Interrogations".

The Working Group never relied upon the extreme power of the commander in chief as the additional techniques they recommended did not approach what could be construed as torture.

[clarification needed] The Working Group voted unanimously to send forth the recommended techniques to Secretary Rumsfeld, who adopted the majority of them.

He learned otherwise only in May 2004, when he heard it referenced in televised reports on the Abu Ghraib scandal, and received confirmation from the deputy general counsel of the Air Force that a final draft of the Working Group's report had been signed out and delivered to the Joint Task Force Guantanamo commander, Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had also been subsequently sent to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" it.

Mora is a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.