Word: mukasey
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Both the Justice Department and the House Intelligence Committee have launched investigations, the latter stymied by the former. On Friday, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey ordered the House intelligence committee to halt its probe for fear that a House investigation would jeopardize that of the Justice Department. Given Mukasey’s refusal to deem one such enhanced interrogation technique, waterboarding, illegal during his confirmation hearings, the Justice Department probe seems likely to shield the Bush administration from censure...
Feinstein, too, lowers the bar by praising Mukasey. She accepts his statement that, “I was asked at the hearing and in your letter questions about the hypothetical use of certain coercive interrogation techniques…hypotheticals are different from real life, and in any legal opinion the actual facts and circumstances are critical.” Mukasey would have you believe that questions about waterboarding are purely hypothetical in nature...
Would that it were so. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who first posed the question about waterboarding, didn’t introduce it as an academic debate. He asked Mukasey whether or not waterboarding was constitutional because of reports from officials familiar with the CIA’s interrogation practices that waterboarding was used by the CIA on three terrorism suspects...
...Mukasey could only offer a conditional statement on waterboarding at best: “If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.” Rather than demonstrate his ability to be “strong and independent,” as Feinstein asserts, Mukasey’s words demonstrate the compatibility of his views with those of the Bush administration. President Bush stated in November 2005 that “We do not torture.” Vice President Dick Cheney said in October 2006, “We don’t torture. That?...
Schumer and Feinstein seem to give Mukasey the benefit of the doubt not from principle, but from cowardice. They are failing to stand up to an administration that has demonstrated willingness time and time again to compromise American values under the guise of protecting national security. They cling to the pipedream of Justice Department reform but endorse an attorney general who parrots the Bush administration on torture...