When's Torture not Torture?

Do you remember the day when Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey unequivocally denounced the use of torture and said that an earlier DOJ memo suggesting that the President could get around the law on torture was a mistake? I was fairly excited when I heard that. But as with previous Bush appointments, things aren't what they seem.

It seems that someone got to him and told him that President Bush is against "torture," but the President wants to be free to decide what is torture and what isn't torture. This has led the candidate to backtrack and take up the Administration line. As detailed in an article carrying the inauspicious headline "Mukasey Punts on Torture," we learn that Mukasey won't say whether waterboarding is torture.

The conflict between Bush and Congress put Mukasey in a bind. A refusal by him to condemn the practice as torture, makes greater Democratic opposition to his nomination inevitable. But if he were to have given Democrats the unambiguous statement they sought, he would have stripped the U.S. intelligence agents of an interrogation technique that the Bush administration says is necessary in the war on terrorism.

Mukasey informed senators that his legal opinion on waterboarding would depend on the facts and circumstances of the program and reminded them that he had not been briefed on the government’s interrogation program and techniques.

You know with something like this, either it is or it isn't. Too bad -- but he doesn't seem fit to be AG! But Michael Westmoreland-White had warned me this would happen.