This is the end of the line. When a nominee for Attorney General does not concede that waterboarding is illegal explicitly because he wishes to protect waterboarders from criminal liability, there is nothing left but shame and mourning.

We, a coalition of Harvard students against torture, call upon others to join us in our symbolic protest of Mukasey’s tortured response by posting an entry in silent, drowning black. (See http://www.stop-torture.org)

Thank you. Keep talking. We need to hear this stuff….

The White House whines that Mukasey has been put in an untenable position

What the White House leaves out is the fact that THEY put him in that position, not the Congress.

Mukasey’s waffling before the Senate Judiciary Committee came in response to a question from Dick Durbin, who then sent the nominee a follow-up letter with the signatures of all his fellow committee Democrats. Republican Arlen Specter then asked Mukasey to clarify his position, as did presidential candidate McCain and Graham, himself an Army lawyer.

In the case of Graham at least, ignore the rhetoric and watch the vote.

He has a history of talking tough on torture only to capitulate when his voice might make a difference in a vote count.

I listened to Gen. Hayden, who spoke in a very straightforward way, only to end ,by saying ‘I can’t tell you,”

I think the military’s new manual is back on track, but the CIA is still, as it has always been, the arm of the government for doing what can’t be done in the light of day. What are they doing and where are they doing it? No one knows. It’s all a national security issue, plus it’s also protection against culpability for past actions.

Hayden, and others, make one argument that is really hard to dispute. If they made their interrogation methods public, enemies could prepare to resist, or take adbantage of, the techniques. Since that would be true for both benign psychological tactics as well as some quite brutal ones, it’s impossible to guess what it really protects. Maybe keeping the enemy guessing is part of the game, too.

I admit also, that the question of what constitutes torture is not as easy to answer as it appears at first glance.
We can all agree about the extremes (NO to waterboarding) but there are so mnay iffy areas. Is denying exercixe really torture? Is faliling to provide a Koran?
Something can be a bad idea without being torture, but in accusations of maltreatment, too much is lumped together with the same degree of condemnation.

From the moment Abu Graib became news, it’s been only an incremental learning curve, and I don;t see the ‘aha, so that’s it” moment ever arriving.
We can only nibble away at what we can nibble away.

Basically, not only the answers are fudged and secretive, we are really not clear about what the wuesions should be. Waterboarding – that’s a clean NO.

But are we making headway on the day to day practices? Frankly I’m just confused at this point. Confused, disgusted, and ashamed for my country.

Excellent post. And thanks to Rudi for the additional link.

In fact, waterboarding is just the type of torture then Lt. Commander John McCain had to endure at the hands of the North Vietnamese. As a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) in San Diego, California I know the waterboard personally and intimately. SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques used by the US army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What was not mentioned in most articles was that SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian, enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. If this is the case, then waterboarding is unquestionably being used as torture technique.

The carnival-like he-said, she-said of the legality of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques has become a form of doublespeak worthy of Catch-22. Having been subjected to them all, I know these techniques, if in fact they are actually being used, are not dangerous when applied in training for short periods. However, when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt. Couple that with waterboarding and the entire medley not only “shock the conscience” as the statute forbids -it would terrify you. Most people can not stand to watch a high intensity kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American.

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraieb and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents.

With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture.

History’s Lessons Ignored

Before arriving for my assignment at SERE, I traveled to Cambodia to visit the torture camps of the Khmer Rouge. The country had just opened for tourism and the effect of the genocide was still heavy in the air. I wanted to know how real torturers and terror camp guards would behave and learn how to resist them from survivors of such horrors. I had previously visited the Nazi death camps Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. I had met and interviewed survivors of Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Magdeburg when I visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. However, it was in the S-21 death camp known as Tuol Sleng, in downtown Phnom Penh, where I found a perfectly intact inclined waterboard. Next to it was the painting on how it was used. It was cruder than ours mainly because they used metal shackles to strap the victim down, and a tin flower pot sprinkler to regulate the water flow rate, but it was the same device I would be subjected to a few weeks later.