Democrashield
emmagold
From CNN:
The Senate late Thursday approved Michael Mukasey’s nomination for attorney general by a 53-40 vote despite controversy over the retired judge’s refusal to brand the terror interrogation technique of waterboarding as torture.
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The nomination had been considered at risk after a number of Democratic senators opposed Mukasey because of questions that arose from his views on waterboarding and the president’s power to order electronic surveillance.
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A majority of Americans consider waterboarding a form of torture, but some of those say it’s OK for the U.S. government to use the technique, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released this week.
More than two-thirds of the respondents, or 69 percent, said they think waterboarding is a form of torture, while 29 percent said they didn’t think so. Fifty-eight percent said they didn’t think the U.S. government should be allowed to use the procedure to try to get information from suspected terrorists, while 40 percent said they did.
Mukasey is the kind of nominee I figured the Bush administration would pick–an unknown career man without much of a record to speak of. His nondescript record meant he faced few roadblocks to confirmation, and now that he’s in office he’ll end up towing the administration line. Mukasey won’t do it as aggressively and flagrantly as Gonzales did, but he’ll still do it.
I’m disappointed his nomination wasn’t tabled in the judiciary committee–there were letigimate reasons to oppose him, particulalry his views on torture and domestic spying. He’s the nation’s top law-enforcement officer, and his job is to ensure that the administration complies with all laws–not just the ones they like. Torture is torture, and America should never tolerate it.
And not “torture” the way the Bush administration defines it, but torture as domestic and international law define it. The White House says they don’t torture because they’ve redefined what torture is. They can lock you in a concrete room with no windows for days, weeks, months, years on end. They can keep out sunlight and feed you at irregular intervals so you lose track of time. They can keep you awake for days on end, checking on you every hour to ensure you haven’t fallen asleep.. They can hood you and put you in restraints so you can’t move. They can chain you to the floor in stress positions for hours on end, cutting off circulation and causing agonizing pain. They can make your cell as freezing cold or burning hot as they want. They can drag you out of your cell every few hours to be waterboarded, to be tied down and have water poured down your throat for as long as they feel like doing it. And even if you get through it, you know they’ll be back in a few hours to do it all over again. They can do all of this and more for years on end. To the Bush administration and Michael Mukasey, none of that is torture because they say it isn’t.
(By the way, the traditional media tends to portray waterboarding as “producing the sensation of drowning.” That’s wrong–it is drowning. They pour water down your throat, and you drown– you just don’t die, if they do it right).
The most telling part of this is Mukasey’s supposed concession on waterboarding–that he’d enforce a Congressionally-mandated government-wide ban on the practice. Of course, he knows that Congress and the Roadblock Republicans are unlikely to ever pass such as resolution–even if they did, the President would surely veto it, and there’s no way half of the Republican caucus would vote to override that veto. It was a hollow promise, and what it shows is that Mukasey doesn’t think there’s any inherent problem with waterboarding–otherwise, he wouldn’t need a Congressional bill to ban it.
The United States of America, sadly, does torture. The administration refuses to call it as much, but that doesn’t change what it is. We have no reason to think that Mukasey will be in any way change that–I expect more of the same from the DoJ until January of 2009.
Meanwhile, there are a number of Senate Democrats I’m severely disappointed with.
