Letters to the Editor
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Scott Horton's reversal
Six weeks ago, Scott Horton supported Mukasey's nomination.
Now, Scott Horton opposes the nomination.
Why? Not because the Senate made torture into a "litmus test", but because the Bush-Cheney-Addington-Cherthoff administration made torture into a "litmus test".
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/09/hbc-90001230
Confirm Michael Mukasey
September 17, 2007[...] I consider Mukasey a highly qualified candidate and am prepared to support him with enthusiasm.
- - Scott Horton, September 17, 2007
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001567
The Torture Litmus Test
November 2, 2007[...] the Bush Administration has developed a new litmus test for its attorney general: he must be prepared to wink at torture publicly, and behind the scenes to issue opinions giving the authors of the program comfort.
[...] So why has torture emerged as a Bush Administration litmus test? My friend Jack Balkin nails this:
[...] That means that the only persons who can be nominated are those who are willing to be complicit in its illegality and dishonor.
[...] The CIA personnel, military personnel and contractors all have immunity. But there is a class of persons who are probably not immunized in any effective way by the current statutes, namely the administration officials who authored this scheme: Dick Cheney, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Haynes and a handful of others. They are the figures “on the line” who are most adamant that Mukasey (or any substitute for Mukasey) provide them with the protection they feel they need.
Hence, the debate around Michael Mukasey has really ceased to be about Michael Mukasey and his qualifications to serve as attorney general. It has become a debate about the torture issue. And protecting the authors of a criminal scheme from their certain ultimate fate: prosecution.
I have very strong conflicting views about the vote which is coming in the Judiciary Committee. I believe that Mukasey, as an individual, is exceptionally well qualified to serve as attorney general. I would approve the Mukasey who says he “personally” finds waterboarding abhorrent. But I am troubled by the “official” Mukasey who is being trotted out as something different. And I believe that the nation cannot, at this stage, accept the appointment of an attorney general who refuses to come clean on the torture issue. In the end this is essential to national identity, and to the promise of the Justice Department to serve as a law enforcement agency. Too much of what the Justice Department has done of late has little resemblance to law enforcement. Rather it looks to be just the opposite.
If the Bush Administration wants to turn torture into a litmus test, so must Congress. The question therefore ultimately becomes one of principle and not personality. The Judiciary Committee should not accept any nominee who fails to provide meaningful assurance on this issue. And, though it saddens me to say this, Michael Mukasey has not.
- - Scott Horton, November 2, 2007
Will the reversal by Scott Horton (and many others) be sufficient to make Russ Feingold (D-WI) oppose Mukasey's nomination? Feingold is admired on both sides of the aisle for his firm principles, but one of those principles is that Feingold has always advocated against "litmus tests" for nominees, and for senatorial deference to all but the most outrageously disqualified presidential nominations. If Russ Feingold judges that Mukasey has disqualified himself, that would probably sway Feingold's colleague Kohl (D-WI), and Feingold could possibly sway some other senators.
OTOH there still remains the problem that a vote against Mukasey is NOT simply a test vote against torture, but also a vote for the current, and worse than Mukasey, acting A.G.
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daniel_f
Why the apparent change?
When he was nominated you seemed to grudgingly support him:
http://salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/16/mukasey/
I was explicit in that post that I wasn't endorsing his nomination. I also said he almost certainly supported all of the most extreme executive power theories. The only point I made was that he was an outsider, and likely to be independent, and that was surprising and unlikely to be true for other nominees. I haven't changed my mind about that.
How do you still feel about "the impressive role he played in presiding over the Jose Padilla case in its earliest stages"? Do you still consider him "very smart and independent, not part of the Bush political circle"? Are you still heartened that he "displayed a willingness to defy the President and reject assertions of lawless and unconstitutional powers, and to refuse to be intimidated by exploitative claims of the Terrorist threat"? I'm glad you're now highlighting the troubling parts of his record. Why the change?
I haven't changed my mind about any of that. Go read the post again. I noted all the troublesome aspects of his record. I just argued that those would be true for every nominee, but at least he has independence and most wouldn't. I still think exactly that. Whether that means he should be confirmed or not was unclear to me back then and still is. If you think there is something inconsistent about what I wrote then and now, you should excerpt both specifically.
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@ondolette
As I recall, from reading other articles on it, the cellophane (actually saran wrap) over the mouth makes the feeling intense because when the water dribbles into the nose forcing a gag and a gasping for air, it is impossible to gasp. It is worth noting that they do the technique on trainees in the CIA, and the average time to breakdown is 40 seconds, even though they know it's a drill.
This is an example of why the USAF no longer uses physical abuse and other such tactics in their combat survival school for combat fliers (I used to be one). They RIGHTLY have concluded the obvious: one cannot be trained to withstand torture but one CAN be trained to withstand a great deal of mental torture. Thus, the actual "stuff" they pull on you in USAF combat survival training is psychological in nature because it is a simple fact that under torture EVERYONE breaks. That is one of the first things they tell you and they also tell you that everyone has a pain threshhold that is not trainable. Your personal threshhold is your personal threshhold and pounding the crap out of you or torturing you (under close control in even a tightly controlled setting) will not help you out whatsoever. You will break like everyone breaks. They don't do waterboarding for similar reasons. No one is immune to drowning and cannot be made immune to drowning so what's the friggin' point in exposing you to drowning?
A follow-on to this is the simple fact that torture doesn't work. Since, for some, it isn't enough to simply state the obvious (that torture is in and of itself a great evil and wrong and can NEVER be justified, particularly for a "liberal democracy" that seeks to claim moral authority on any matter), the operational fact is torture produces garbage. Sure, anything you know you WILL spill under torture, but you will also spill anything and everything you DON'T know. You will say ANYTHING, admit to ANYTHING, to make the torture stop. The torturer is then left, if they actual give a f*ck, with trying to parse the fact from the fiction. A totally innocent person will spew out all kinds of self-incriminating nonsense, admitting to any number of crimes just like someone actually guilty of the same. You cannot tell the difference, thus it is total crap to use it in the first place. Once more, you can get the SAME "intelligence" from a subject if you use non-painful euphoric drugs rather than torture. If you just MUST get crap information, how about defaulting to the non-painful, non-torturing means of using drugs rather than sexually-deviant physical torture? The information gained is equally shitty afterall, so it makes no difference if so-called "information" is what you are after. The ONLY reason to use torture is psycho-sexual. You are a friggin sick pervert and/or a sociopath to choose torture, plain and simple.