The American Bar Association has again reached into the ranks of the military for its top personnel. The association on Thursday named Jack Rives, the former judge advocate general for the U.S. Air Force, as its new executive director.
In that position, Rives was one of several top military JAG officers who were critical of the so-called torture memos that were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 to legally support enhanced interrogation methods used on detainees. In one message cited in congressional testimony last year, Rives was quoted as saying that “the use of the more extreme interrogation techniques simply is not how the U.S. armed forces have operated in recent history. We have taken the legal and moral ‘high ground’?”
