MUKASEY PASSES SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE
Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Harvard Law grad and Democratic senator from N.Y., has voted (along with Sen. Diane Feinstein of California, another Democrat) to confirm Michael Mukasey as U.S. Attorney-General, despite his failure to condemn waterboarding as torture. Instead he's made an oral promise to Schumer in a private conversation, says Schumer, that he will prosecute waterboarding as torture if Congress passes a law forbidding it.
This is slightly idiotic because Congress cannot pass legislation without the president's signature and it doesn't seem likely that George W. is apt to want to allow members of the team he captains, including himself, to be prosecuted for the way it fights the war on terror, regardless that it shows the U.S. to be no better than the worst countries in the world which use tactics we'd thought last appeared in torture museums and the Spanish Inquisition, which Spain has disavowed, but we, apparently, have not.
I don't know why Feinstein has voted to support Mukasey. In an interview, however, she said that the main reason was that he was not Alberto Gonzales. This is faint praise, indeed. On that theory, Charles Manson would make a fine candidate, considering his legal experience. Feinstein also states that Mukasey does not owe his political and legal career to Bush. No, only the new job of Attorney-General of the U.S., thank you.
Schumer says that regardless of Mukasey's stance on torture, he'll do wonders to clean up the Justice Department. Right. He's going to remove the GOP politics that have tainted it for years. How is he going to do that in one year, pray tell. Even Schumer, in his Op-Ed piece, explaining his vote, notes the filth left by Alberto Gonzales and the fella' he answered to, Karl Rove and, I don't doubt, VP Dick Cheney and his henchman, Addington, another strong supporter of the president's prerogative to allow all means necessary to encourage enemies to talk, short of death and serious bodily injury, no matter how degrading or humiliating.
These are exactly the things we teach our troops not to do and protest when, as in Sen. John McCain's experience, they are done to us. McCain was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese during our war there, where he was brutally beaten and tortured in a prison camp ironically named the Hanoi Hilton. To his everlasting credit and honor, he refused early release ahead of fellow POWs, when the Viet Cong learned that his father was a big shot, the head of our Western Pacific Command, which calls the shots for the Navy and thus the country, by and large, militarily.
Op-Ed Contributor
A Vote for Justice
A Vote for Justice
Washington
I AM voting today to support Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general for one critical reason: the Department of Justice — once the crown jewel among our government institutions — is a shambles and is in desperate need of a strong leader, committed to depoliticizing the agency’s operations.
The department has been devastated under the Bush administration. Outstanding United States attorneys have been dismissed without cause; career civil-rights lawyers have been driven out in droves; people appear to have been prosecuted for political reasons; young lawyers have been rejected because they were not conservative ideologues; and politics has been allowed to infect decision-making.
We are now on the brink of a reversal. There is virtually universal agreement, even from those who oppose Judge Mukasey, that he would do a good job in turning the department around. My colleagues who oppose his confirmation have gone out of their way to praise his character and qualifications. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, for one, commended Judge Mukasey as “a brilliant lawyer, a distinguished jurist and by all accounts a good man.”
Most important, Judge Mukasey has demonstrated his fidelity to the rule of law, saying that if he believed the president were violating the law he would resign.
Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate. To accept such an unaccountable attorney general, I believe, would be to surrender the department to the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington. All the work we did to pressure Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign would be undone in a moment.
I deeply oppose this administration’s opaque policy on the use of torture — its refusal to reveal what forms of interrogation it considers acceptable. In particular, I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant but also illegal under current laws and conventions. I also support Congress’s efforts to pass additional measures that would explicitly ban this and other forms of torture. I voted for Senator Ted Kennedy’s anti-torture amendment in 2006 and am a co-sponsor of his similar bill in this Congress.
Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering — and I hope we will soon pass — a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.
On Friday, he personally made clear to me that if the law were in place, the president would have no legal authority to ignore it — not even under some theory of inherent authority granted by Article II of the Constitution, as Vice President Cheney might argue. Nor would the president be able to evade a clear pronouncement on the subject from the courts. Judge Mukasey also pledged to enforce such a law.
From a Bush nominee, this is no small commitment. In many aspects, Judge Mukasey reminds me of Jim Comey, a former deputy attorney general in the Bush administration who has been widely praised for his independence; he did not always agree with us on the issues, but was willing to fight administration officials when he thought they were wrong.
Even without the proposed law in place, Judge Mukasey would be more likely than a caretaker attorney general to find on his own that waterboarding and other techniques are illegal. Indeed, his written answers to our questions have demonstrated more openness to ending the practices we abhor than either of this president’s previous attorney general nominees have had.
I understand and respect my colleagues who believe that Judge Mukasey’s view on torture should trump all other considerations. For the Senate to make a bold declaration about torture and waterboarding by rejecting him is appealing. But if we block Judge Mukasey’s nomination and then learn in six months that waterboarding has continued unabated, that victory will seem much less valuable.
To defeat him would be to abandon the hope of instituting the many reforms called for by our investigation. No one questions that Judge Mukasey would do much to remove the stench of politics from the Justice Department. I believe we should give him that chance.
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