File this under Duh: “There’s an
enemy out there. I don’t want them to
understand, to be able to adjust one way or the other. The American people have got to understand the program is important and the techniques used are within the law.” We poor, dim-witted Americans to whom the all-knowing, all-wise George W. Bush has so much trouble getting through might have trouble understanding, but you best better believe that whether our government admits to torturing “evildoers” or doesn’t, evildoers aren’t sitting around boning up on U. S. law and executive orders to determine how far that torture will go. In what The Washington Post characterized as an “unusual Oval Office session with pool reporters” on Thursday, Bush attempted to defend Michael B. Mukasey’s reticence about the matter of waterboarding as torture.
Mukasey is Bush’s latest choice to become attorney general of the United States, and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have been having a field day putting him through his paces. It’s hard to take them seriously because grandstanding is what partisans, Democrats and Republicans alike, do best when presidents from the opposing party submit their nominees for key government posts. On the other hand, Bush’s prosecution of the war in Iraq has become very unpopular, and he with it, which gives an interesting edge to the current posturing.
I’m not ready to concede that Mukasey won’t be confirmed—presidential nominees usually are—but he certainly made a mess of his nest by hemhawing over the waterboarding issue.
Waterboarding, said to be employed by Army interrogators before Congress prohibited it in 2005, is a form of psychological torture with physical aspects. It’s said to involve strapping a person to an inclined board, covering his face with a cloth and pouring water over the cloth to simulate drowning. Critics contend that the CIA is still using the technique, and although he hasn’t addressed that claim, Mukasey has pointed out that the 2005 law pertained only to the military.
Mukasey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that, personally, he finds the notion of waterboarding repugnant, but apparently he wasn’t prepared to say whether it should or shouldn’t be used. That’s a legal question, the retired federal jurist insisted. Besides, he added, he doesn’t deal in hypotheticals.
“Legal questions must be answered based solely on the actual facts, circumstances and the legal standards presented,” he said in a letter to the committee earlier this week.
Bush chastised the committee members, mostly Democrats but some Republicans, who have been insisting that Mukasey address waterboarding’s legality.
“I believe the questions he’s been asked are unfair,” Bush told the pool reporters. “He’s been asked to give opinions on a program—or techniques of a program—on which he has not been briefed.”
That last remark is pretty close to an admission that there is a program of torture, one that includes waterboarding. What is technique but a way of carrying out a particular task ? Besides, why would Mukasey have to be briefed on the program or the techniques if no one is being subjected to such things ?
I’ve got news for this administration. We Americans aren’t stupid. We know we have enemies, and we know that not all of them are outside our borders. Indeed, some of them get to hold news conferences any time they so desire. Fortunately, they still can’t tell reporters what to report or publishers what to publish.
If you haven’t read the editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, “Torture and the Attorneys General,” I recommend that you do so. If nothing more, read the first three paragraphs. They tell you all you need to know about what will be Bush’s legacy and that of the congresses that cleared a path and rallied him on: restrictions of civil liberties, torture redefined, the Geneva Conventions repudiated, illegal detention camps installed, the fundamental human rights of foreigners revoked, justice politicized, all to broaden the government’s options for accumulating power and waging war on the oil-rich Middle East.
And now, to follow in the dreadful wake of John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, he champions a man who, as the Times put it, “has stunned us during the confirmation process by saying he believes the president has the power to negate laws and... has suggested that he will not uphold standards of decency during wartime recognized by the civilized world for generations.”
Unacceptable. Mukasey, with his apparent dedication to the proposition that, in America, all men are created equal but some men, namely presidents, are more equal than others, is simply unacceptable. Bush probably can’t do any better, but he’d sure better try.
—–––––•–––––—Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online