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Remember back when we didn’t believe in torturing people? Turns out it's way more interesting to reopen the whole question and bicker with the umps about their recent calls. Let’s go to the telestrator:
Out on the field this week, we have Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., announcing yesterday that water-boarding is legal whereas “putting burning coals on people's bodies” is torture. Shooting the breeze with the BBC, Justice Antonin Scalia declares that he would have no problem shoving a little “something under the fingernails, smack him in the face” but conceded that these are not easy questions. And Sen. John McCain scores a touchdown for the opposing team when he says he wants torture to be illegal unless the CIA is doing it, in which case it isn’t. Finally, the week closed with Steven Bradbury, who heads up the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department and is confident that it isn’t really water-boarding if it’s changed since the Spanish Inquisition.
It would be totally awesome if we could just throw open the whole U.S. Code and race around the football field renegotiating all of it for ourselves, don’t you think? I'm going to redefine shoplifting this weekend and go find me some Prada sandals.
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Reading the story about the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes that Dahlia points to, I couldn't help being struck by an eerie parallel. This story is unfolding a couple of days after the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the latest case about whether the Guantanamo Bay detainees have any right at all to get to federal court. Days after an earlier go-round about Guantanamo at the high court, in 2004, the Abu Ghraib story broke. The timing raised eyebrows because at oral argument, Paul Clement (now solicitor general) had answered "no" to a question from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about whether the government ever engages in torture.
There was no moment like that at argument this week, and the timing of the CIA story seems driven by the New York Times, which says that it told the CIA Wednesday that it was about to report on the tapes' destruction. And yet the parallel is there: This week, the government assured the court that the detainees had more rights than anyone in their situation before. Never mind that we're destroying the evidence of how we've treated them. Just don't look behind the curtain.
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Remember that whole big legal debate we were having last month about water-boarding? Remember when we were trying to understand why Michael Mukasey wouldn’t just come out and say water-boarding is torture? Remember when everyone thought the Bush administration was just trying to provide legal cover for the torturers???
Wrong. Why provide legal cover for the torturers if you can just destroy the evidence?
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Hillary jumps the same way as Obama:
"I am deeply troubled by Judge Mukasey’s continued unwillingness to clearly state his views on torture and unchecked Executive power.
The Attorney General is the chief defender of the rule of law in our country. After Alberto Gonzales's troubled tenure, we cannot send a signal that the next Attorney General in any way condones torture or believes that the President is unconstrained by law. When we leave any doubt about our nation’s policy on torture, we send a terrible message to the rest of the world. Judge Mukasey has been given ample opportunity – both at his confirmation hearings and in his subsequent submission to the Judiciary Committee – to clarify his answers and categorically oppose the unacceptable interrogation techniques employed by this Administration. His failure to do so leaves me no choice but to oppose his nomination."
Meanwhile, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee await Mukasey's answers to the questions they've asked him.
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In a press release today, Obama said of Mukasey: “While his legal credentials are strong, his views on two critical and related matters are, in my view, disqualifying. We don't need another attorney general who believes that the President enjoys an unwritten right to secretly ignore any law or abridge our constitutional freedoms simply by invoking national security. And we don't need another attorney general who looks the other way on issues as profound as torture. Judge Mukasey's professed ignorance of the debate over the propriety of practices like “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning, as a means of interrogation, was appalling."
Now what? Do other Democrats--among them Hillary Clinton--jump the same way? Or do they (ie some of the senators on the Judiciary Committee) keep trying to look like they're pressing Mukasey while planning to wave him through?
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Here's what Giuliani has to say about waterboarding, in reponse to a question about AG-choice Mukasey's refusal to say that the tactic amounts to torture: “Well, I’m not sure it is either. It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it’s been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that’s the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn’t be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is.”
Whaaa? The descriptions of waterboarding are clear and unrefuted. They come from inside the CIA. Here's a short video reenactment. As Dahlia points out to me, Giuliani's hemming and shuffling is like the senators who didn't bother to find out how the Guantanamo detainees were treated before voting on John McCain's anti-torture provision in the Detainee Treatment Act. If you don't know what's happening, you can keep going along with it.
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