Guest Blogged by Arlen Parsa
At his confirmation hearings this past week, Bush’s Attorney General nominee Mike Mukasey was asked by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) if he considered waterboarding a form of torture. Here’s an exchange the two had:
…
SEN. WHITEHOUSE: If it’s torture. That’s a massive hedge. I mean, it either is or it isn’t. Do you have an opinion on whether waterboarding…is constitutional?
MUKASEY: If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.
SEN. WHITEHOUSE: I’m very disappointed in that answer. I think it is purely semantic.
MUKASEY: I’m sorry.
Mukasey’s refusal to categorize waterboarding as torture is troubling to say the least…
In a classified memo released after the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials signed off on dozens of controversial interrogation techniques, many of which are explicitly banned as war crimes under the legally binding UN Convention Against Torture (UNCAT). Among the techniques referenced was waterboarding:
Download the full memo here (780kb PDF). The Department of Defense only refers to waterboarding in the most sterile and clinical terms, but it’s worth understanding how waterboarding actually works, in real life practice.
STEP 2: The end of the board with the victim’s feet tied to it is elevated so that their head is at the floor and their feet are several feet above them
STEP 3: A piece of wet plastic or fabric is used to constrain the air flow to the victim’s nose and mouth
STEP 4: Cold water is poured all over the victim’s body, head and face, creating a simulation of drowning which can sometimes result in permanent brain and lung damage or even death
STEP 5: The victim is made to believe that they are drowning (i.e. a form of simulated execution, explicitly banned under UNCAT), and that their interrogators will not stop until they admit guilt of their supposed crimes
An early form of waterboarding was originally invented during the Spanish Inquisition and it has been used by the Khmer Rouge. After World War II, the US captured a Japanese officer and convicted him of war crimes after they discovered he had waterboarded an American civilian. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for using the exact same interrogation technique that high-level Bush Administration officials like ex-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Mukasey’s predecessor Alberto Gonzales have personally signed off on.
If Musakey can’t call a spade a spade, and can’t call torture torture, he is not fit for the job of the top law enforcement official in the country.
I’ve been trying to listen to every word on the C-SPAN archives between power outages and it is way not encouraging. I feel sick that the majority seems so eager to like this cagey old shit… in the name of how badly we need someone to fix the DoJ. I don’t get the feeling he will fix it at all, except as cosmetically as possible. The point is to make us feel okay about the administration of justice in our country again. This is not cutting it, and the thought that the Senate may well be concertedly trying to bill it as such is just agonizing.
Is it outright impossible for them to see anything without the lens of politics clouding it up? This is disorienting stuff!
Oh, and by the way, I heard Grassley — I’m almost certain it was Grassley because I was so surprised it was a Republican — griping at him about the huge backlog of qui tam cases on hold an outrageously long time in the DoJ, wanting to know what the hell he intended to do about them, and that would tend to answer our questions about what happened to the Kennedy/Papantonio qui tam thing….
I wonder what he would say about the new Valerie Plame Wilson revelations over at Raw Story.
Evidently she was working on prevention of Iran acquiring nukes. Her outing by Cheney and flunkies destroyed the US’s spy network there.
You are “doin a heckuva job” dickie.
My stomach just lurched. What if …
stopping the nukes program would take away their basis for attacking Iran, and outing Valerie was intended to kill two birds with one stone, the discrediting of Joe Wilson being the second bird, not the first.
‘scuse me, I have to go throw up now.
It’s not over until WE get nuked.
That’s why I kind of wonder what happened with those nukes flying across the US.
Is there a missing nuke?
Boy I bet that fucking question gets answered as fast as the anthrax source question.
Look, eithier we get our elected officials to draw the line at torture, or we get Hand Counted Paper Ballots to get rid of the lot of em. Do nothing and see what happens assholes.
For people who were following the Plame story from the onset it isn’t a surprise to learn she worked on nuke non-proliferaton in Iran and perhaps Iraq. There was even speculation that her team caught Bush trying to smuggle nukes into Iraq and that stopping them made it possible for everyone now to know there never were nukes in Iraq.
When Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage outed her to the journalist Bob Woodward he said, ‘It’s perfect’ and nobody quite knew what he meant. Now I think it’s clear he meant they could attack Joe Wilson and people wouldn’t realize they were really destroying Valerie Plame to kill her network in the Middle East.
What I want to know is why Richard Armitage, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer and Lewis “Scooter” Libby aren’t in jail for outing a secret (NOC) agent? It’s the first time in history (of the world) that a country has outed it’s own secret agent. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald convicted Libby of perjury, but he has some explaining to do about why all four aren’t in jail for outing Plame.
JG #4
It makes a LOT more sense that they’d resort to treason over keeping their war machine happening than smacking an uppity ambassador.
I say let’s waterboard Mukasey’s ass and see if he calls it torture then. By the way, the U.S. government has prosecuted foreigners for waterboarding American P.O.W.s in World War II. But it’s OK when America does it because _________ ?
And I should have mentioned, when the U.S. government prosecuted them for waterboarding Americans, it did not hesitate to explicitly call it TORTURE.
Who Would Jesus Torture?
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