When he went through confirmation hearings, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said about waterboarding, ‘if it’s torture, then it’s torture’ - which was both meaningless and obscene.
After Michael Mukasey was shamefully confirmed as Attorney General, he said in U.S. Senate hearings that he “would feel” that waterboarding was torture if it were done to him.
That was self-centered, and offered little progress.
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On January 30, in Senate hearings, Mukasey said “There are circumstances where waterboarding is clearly unlawful… What I have said is simply that there may be circumstances in which that presents a difficult question. I haven’t said that there are circumstances in which it’s clearly lawful…. I’m not get into any discussion, in the abstract, of circumstances in which it might be.”
We’ll take this as progress, in the abstract, however small.
With the recent admission that the United States has in fact practiced waterboarding on prisoners, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin sent a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking, “[i]n light of your testimony that, ‘There are circumstances where waterboarding is clearly unlawful,’ …[w]ill the Justice Department investigate the Administration’s use of waterboarding to determine whether any laws were violated?”
So how will the Attorney General now respond?
Attorney General Mukasey effectively responded in a U.S. House hearing yesterday, saying, that he is not ready to start a criminal investigation. Why? Because people were following orders.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s position affronts humanity. If something constitutes torture, as the United States and the world have historically treated waterboarding, then trumped up legal opinions saying that it’s “ok” are meaningless. Real conservatives and decent people of all political stripes take note: could there be any restrictions on executive actions if the Justice Department decided to write a legal opinion justifying any particular atrocity formerly illegal without any checks on its authority? It’s a lawless doctrine. I don’t think it unfair to say that the Nazis, who employed the torture techniques we have employed (and were punished for them), would be held blameless using Mukasey’s doctrine. After all, they too were just following orders. Here’s the more explicit link between Nazi crimes against humanity and what we’ve been doing:
“[T]he interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture - ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.”
I remember when we were the good guys - and thankfully most of us still are the good guys. What will my children remember? It’s a question you’ve got to ask yourself.
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