When this administration finally waves goodbye, I hope that, among other things, George W. Bush is remembered as “the Torture President.”
Although his nominees (and his vice-president) are the ones who defend torture in public, Bush should be the one we understand to be behind this policy. As clueless and out of touch as he might seem — or be — as our elected president, he needs to take the blame for promoting this shameful human rights abuse as a “necessary” tactic in the “war on terror.”
As the confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Michale Mukasey continue, how else are we to understand this administration’s consistent evasions on torture techniques like waterboarding? Although the technique — a simulated drowning, designed to make the victim feel as if he or she is going to die — is as old as the hills, Mukasey claimed, upon direct questioning, that he didn’t “know what is involved in the technique.”
Perhaps he should read up on the history of Argentina’s “Dirty War” or the messy business between Peru’s security forces and the Maoist Shining Path. Throughout Latin America, “el submarino” — the submarine, simulated drowning, i.e. waterboarding without the board — was a routine torture technique.
This photo was taken in the 1970s by an Uruguayan who worked in a torture center.
Or Mukasey could go further back, to the history of the French campaign against Algerian rebels. In this video, Algerian journalist Henri Aleg talks about how he was tortured with simulated drowning by the French (who taught their techniques to the South Americans and Americans in the later 1950s):
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There is an excellent documentary about how French veterans of the Algerian campaign taught their torture techniques, “Death Squadrons: The French School.”
In one of these twisted TV moments, Fox News reporter Steve Harrigan had himself waterboarded “to leave aside qestions of whether or not this was torture.” Well, Steve — how did it feel?
In today’s Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Turley has an excellent oped on Mukasey’s attempted evasion of the waterboarding question, put to him by Illinois senator (and majority whip) Dick Durbin.
When asked about (waterboarding), though, Mukasey suddenly seemed to morph into his predecessor, Alberto R. Gonzales — beginning with a series of openly evasive answers that ultimately led to what appeared to be a lie. At first, he repeatedly stated that he does not support torture, which violates the U.S. Constitution. This is precisely the answer given so often by President Bush like a mantra. The problem is that Bush defines torture to exclude things like water-boarding. It is like saying you do not rob banks, but then defining bank robbery in such a way that it does not include walking in with a gun and demanding money from the cashier.
The senators pushed Mukasey to go beyond the Bush administration mantra. He refused and then said something that made many of us who were listening gasp: “I don’t know what is involved in the technique,” he said.
There are only two explanations for this answer, either of which should compel the senators to vote against confirmation. The first is that Mukasey is the most ill-informed nominee in the history of this republic. Torture, and water-boarding in particular, is one of the top issues facing the Justice Department, the subject of numerous lawsuits and one of the most obvious, predictable topics at the hearing. It has been discussed literally thousands of times in the media during the last six years. To say he is unfamiliar with the technique is perhaps the single greatest claim of ignorance since Clarence Thomas testified at his confirmation that he really had not thought enough about abortion to have an opinion on the subject.
The second possibility is, unfortunately, the more likely explanation: Mukasey is lying.
However, Turley rightly doesn’t let the Democrats off the hook on this one. They must do more than ask an uncomfortable question, then vote to confirm yet another of Bush’s torturers.
As Turley notes, “This confirmation vote should be about torture. It is truly a defining issue, not just of the meaning of torture but of the very character of our country. It is the issue that distinguishes a nation fighting for the rule of law from a nation that is a threat to it. If members of the Senate consider torture to be immoral, they must vote against Mukasey.”