Our Ms. Brooks: The Ghoulish Administration
Rosa Brooks has a particularly timely column up in today's Los Angeles Times. Written in the Halloween spirit, Ms. Brooks takes a hard look on Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey and his ambiguous stance on water boarding.
The Bush administration's Justice Department has been a horror show for years now, complete with gruesome exhibits like the infamous 2002 "torture memo." And in his recent Senate confirmation hearings, the attorney general nominee, Michael Mukasey, seemed determined to honor the department's most ghoulish traditions. ...
Mukasey can't decide if nearly drowning someone in order to extract information is torture? Life (and law) is full of hard questions, but this is one of the easy ones. Water-boarding is one of the oldest and most classic forms of torture. The Spanish Inquisition used it. Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge used it. During World War II, Japanese soldiers used water-boarding against civilian detainees and U.S. military POWs -- and were later prosecuted for this by U.S. military tribunals. Until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took office, the U.S. government and U.S. courts consistently took the position -- along with the rest of the civilized world -- that water-boarding was torture. ...
I know it's Halloween week, but Mukasey's not auditioning for a job as a spook. ...
And that's the point. As most commenters, both in and out of the mainstream media, have pointed out, if water boarding is torture, and decent, rational people know that it is, then those who engage in it and those who have authorized it have broken the law and should be prosecuted. There is nothing hard about that. What apparently is hard for Mr. Mukasey is that he may have to prosecute the very people who have offered him this most prestigious of jobs. For any human being with even a shred of decency, this should not matter.
Ms. Brooks lays out the options very nicely in her conclusion:
The Justice Department will inevitably be something of a haunted house for years to come, in need of exorcism to get rid of the ghosts of torture-enablers past. In his distinguished career as a judge, Mukasey has often shown enough independence and thoughtfulness to earn him praise even from many Democratic critics of the Bush administration. If he can unambiguously repudiate water-boarding and similar interrogation tactics, the Senate should confirm him as attorney general.
Of course, maybe Mukasey doesn't want to say that water-boarding is torture because, deep down, he considers it an appropriate interrogation tactic. But if that's what's really going on here, Mukasey should take off his nice-guy mask and let everyone see the true face underneath. He should tell the Senate, loud and clear, that he thinks the U.S. should abandon its most basic values and insist on the right to torture prisoners.
And the Senate, if it has any sense of integrity at all, should refuse to confirm him as attorney general. Around the world, there are dozens of abusive regimes that would probably be delighted to have a torture proponent as their top law enforcement official.
Indeed.
The Bush administration's Justice Department has been a horror show for years now, complete with gruesome exhibits like the infamous 2002 "torture memo." And in his recent Senate confirmation hearings, the attorney general nominee, Michael Mukasey, seemed determined to honor the department's most ghoulish traditions. ...
Mukasey can't decide if nearly drowning someone in order to extract information is torture? Life (and law) is full of hard questions, but this is one of the easy ones. Water-boarding is one of the oldest and most classic forms of torture. The Spanish Inquisition used it. Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge used it. During World War II, Japanese soldiers used water-boarding against civilian detainees and U.S. military POWs -- and were later prosecuted for this by U.S. military tribunals. Until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took office, the U.S. government and U.S. courts consistently took the position -- along with the rest of the civilized world -- that water-boarding was torture. ...
I know it's Halloween week, but Mukasey's not auditioning for a job as a spook. ...
And that's the point. As most commenters, both in and out of the mainstream media, have pointed out, if water boarding is torture, and decent, rational people know that it is, then those who engage in it and those who have authorized it have broken the law and should be prosecuted. There is nothing hard about that. What apparently is hard for Mr. Mukasey is that he may have to prosecute the very people who have offered him this most prestigious of jobs. For any human being with even a shred of decency, this should not matter.
Ms. Brooks lays out the options very nicely in her conclusion:
The Justice Department will inevitably be something of a haunted house for years to come, in need of exorcism to get rid of the ghosts of torture-enablers past. In his distinguished career as a judge, Mukasey has often shown enough independence and thoughtfulness to earn him praise even from many Democratic critics of the Bush administration. If he can unambiguously repudiate water-boarding and similar interrogation tactics, the Senate should confirm him as attorney general.
Of course, maybe Mukasey doesn't want to say that water-boarding is torture because, deep down, he considers it an appropriate interrogation tactic. But if that's what's really going on here, Mukasey should take off his nice-guy mask and let everyone see the true face underneath. He should tell the Senate, loud and clear, that he thinks the U.S. should abandon its most basic values and insist on the right to torture prisoners.
And the Senate, if it has any sense of integrity at all, should refuse to confirm him as attorney general. Around the world, there are dozens of abusive regimes that would probably be delighted to have a torture proponent as their top law enforcement official.
Indeed.
Labels: Justice Department, Torture
posted by Diane at 9:00 AM
2 Comments:
I blogged on this matter, today, or was it yesterday?
She's right. If they -- the Bush Administration -- think that waterboarding is okay, that it's not torture, then they should say it loud and clear. Stop playing word games. Make it plain: we want to torture people. This is where our fear and our insecurity have led us, to the point where we want to torture people to make ourselves feel stronger, to pretend that we're stopping the bad guys from hurting us.
It's enough to make you sick.
Post a Comment
<< Home