We need leaders today who dare to defend the rule of law and the role of debate in our government against those who would suppress or circumvent them.

At a time when the proscription against torture has been undermined, when a secret domestic spying program has been carried out in apparent violation of federal law, when the president has claimed the authority to disregard hundreds of other statutes passed by Congress, and when the country has been taken to war under an erroneous pretext, we should follow the example of those who stand up for democracy. That's the message of Alberto Mora and John Murtha.

John Shattuck, CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, is the author of ''Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America's Response."

JOHN SHATTUCK: In search of political courage
 

Mora challenged the Justice Department. He charged that the policy allowed ''cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees," and expressed deep disagreement with its ''extreme and virtually unlimited theory of the extent of the President's authority." Mora confronted the author of the memo, Office of Legal Counsel Deputy Director John Yoo, asking him ''whether the president could order the application of torture." Mora wrote in his memo to the inspector general: ''Yoo responded, 'Yes.' "

Mora was shocked. He worked hard to get the Pentagon to shelve what he called this ''deeply flawed" policy that now had been hijacked by the Justice Department. For nearly a year Mora thought he had succeeded in persuading his superiors to block the policy, because the Rumsfeld and Legal Counsel memoranda were never finalized.

Then in April 2004 the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke. Mora learned the bitter truth -- the torture policy he and others inside the Pentagon had fought so courageously to stop had secretly been kept in place all along, and the horrors they had warned against had come to pass.