We've Come Undone
I can't express how extremely upset I still am by the fact that Mukasey's nomination as Attorney General appears to be a forgone conclusion, despite his stance on torture and executive power. See You Suck, Chuck. This Countdown video features Keith Olbermann discussing the situation with Richard Wolfe of Newsweek and Former Nixon White House Counsel, John Dean. See also, TPM's post, Dean on Mukasey, for Dean's reminder of the "direct situational and historical parallels with Judge Mukasey’s nomination to be Attorney General and that of President Richard Nixon nominating Elliot Richardson to be Attorney General during Watergate."
However, what was truly shocking to me was the revelation that a former DOJ official, Daniel Levin, the then acting assistant attorney general, "charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand." Afterward, he became convinced that it was torture and began revising the Department's memos on torture, but was fired by Gonzales before he completed his memo requiring tighter controls on interrogation techniques. See White House Blocked Waterboarding Critic.
Has it really come to this? Is there nothing that this county stands for in the "post 9/11 world" other than terror? Whether it's that we are paralyzed by terror or we are intent on inflicting terror on others. Glenn Greenwald of Salon expresses the state of our sad moral compass, in Mukasey's nomination and the sudden opposition to "waterboarding":
What Judge Mukasey believes is, without question, radical and disturbing. His beliefs -- from the power of the President to violate Congressional statutes to limitless war powers to the authority to order barbaric interrogation methods -- would have been unthinkable six years ago in an Attorney General. But now, it and he are well within mainstream Beltway ideology, thanks to some combination of acquiescence and active support from the core of both political parties. And there is something deeply artificial and manipulative about a Congress that has decided to permit all of these things to take root to pretend suddenly that they are so offended by them, that what Mukasey believes crosses their bright lines so clearly that he cannot be confirmed.
If Mukasey's nomination were rejected (and the likelihood that Democrats will actually take this or any other stand seems very low), it seems as though the most significant impact would be to allow Senate Democrats to claim that they took a stand for critical principles -- principles that they have permitted to be eroded and assaulted for years, when they weren't doing the eroding and assaulting themselves. And while a late defense of these principles is certainly better than none at all, it is far from clear that rejecting Mukasey's nomination would really amount to a restoration of any of these principles.
The concessions by the Senate members of the Democrat Party (a/k/a the "Icky Party") have rendered them as responsible, if not more so, for condoning torture. As Andrew Sullivan correctly points out, "the pro-torture right will use Feinstein's and Schumer's capitulation on the rule of law to advance the torture program," in The Mukasey Precedent:
That torture would be acceptable to this Administration is the subject of a Buzzflash analysis, Channeling Bush’s Inner Sadist: An Insight Into His Obsession with Torture, which reflects upon Bush's own obsession with torture, which was noted by Doonesbury's Gary Trudeau, back in his Yale days:The current Republican standard is that if the Congress does not explicitly forbid specific torture techniques as illegal, then they're legal. They hold that the clear and broad legal standard - "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" - is too broad and too clear to accommodate what a handful of men, i.e. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, et al. want to do with prisoners under their control.
Even though waterboarding has always been regarded as torture and is illegal under any meaningful understanding of English; even though the United States prosecuted Nazis as war criminals for performing exactly the same torture techniques now authorized by the United States under the rubric of "enhanced interrogation"; even though the United States has court-martialed soldiers for doing what the president has authorized; unless the specific techniques are entered explicitly into the law, according to Lowry, the Geneva Conventions and settled law don't apply. And so any vote for Mukasey will now be interpreted by torture advocates like Lowry and Bush administration officials as legal support for torture.
Bush is a model narcissistic sociopath, who is devoid of the ability to empathize. It is the characteristic of such people to have the ability to 'appear' to be concerned about others, but that is just for show. The inner heart is empty. You can knock all you want, but you won’t find anyone home in the empathy department when it comes to sociopathic personalities.Upon reading this, I was reminded of my earlier post where I noted Bush's affinity for torture based upon his frat days, in December of 2005 in He's still just a Frat Boy.
The long-ago forgotten recollection of Garry Trudeau, as corroborated in the Yale Daily News and The New York Times, indicates quite clearly Bush’s mindset: inside of the 'great hugger' is a 'great sadist.'
And since it's come to this, in case a history lesson on waterboarding is needed, Marty Lederman of Balkinization provides it, in Waterboarding Through the Ages.
And as a final somewhat warped humorous note, PA's own Senator Specter has surprisingly announced his plan to vote in favor of Mukasey. Specter Says He Will Back AG Nominee. Specter is like a big puff of smoke -- lots of stuff happening in the mist and then, when it goes away -- there's nothing there. Just like him, lot's of sound and noise and fury, followed by his capitulation to the party's demands. (Of course, he started in political career as a democrat, so that must be where he learned how to be so spineless).
(Video via Crooks and Liars)
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