Comments on: Months Later, Mukasey Still Thinking About Waterboarding and Says He May Never Say Whether it is Torture

By: deeply worried

deeply worried — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:08:50 +0000

Tomorrow, my formerly admired Judge Mukasey will go before Congress again.

Obviously staffers there have been crafting questions for him that will attempt to pin him down on waterboarding and it will be like trying to push jello using rubber bands I predict. A frustrating and futile exercise.

There is a better tack to take. Perhaps a reductio ad absurdam, but it would have to be cleverly disguised.

By: Jill Berkana

Jill Berkana — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:47:48 +0000

Tony Lagouranis has written an excellent book on why the U.S. should never engage in torture. It’s called: Fear UP Harsh, an Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through Iraq.

I also worry that the inane political coverage will continue to disinform our population about the substantive ideas of the candidates as well as overshadow the many illegalities the Bush admistration engages in.

I do not understand how to reach our press or this congress. I do know it always helps when people speak out.

By: deeply worried

deeply worried — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:13:49 +0000

Not all the Democrats were in the loop, just the leadership.

But that’s sufficient to stop the machinery of oversight and correction of these intolerable abuses.

How is something so barbaric, shocking to the conscious, and alien to our professed national ideals, as torture and rendition to torture and death, made tolerable, made forgettable?

The nation is being given a textbook lesson in how to do so.

We now are seeing one of the most regrettable failings of a party system of government. The leadership can dampen and dilute the reformist spirit of the party rank-and-file. If there were no leadership, we would already have had impeachment proceedings started.

A last thought: waterboarding, hideous as it is, was in all likelihood the least of the horrors of the program of detention and rendition. People were killed in those prisons, beaten to death, and mutilated.

I pray that someday we as a nation repudiate what the government of this fading era did and belatedly try to make amends.

By: jonathanturley

jonathanturley — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 16:52:08 +0000

For one thing, Speaker Pelosi stated before her selection that there would be no impeachment. More importantly, it was recently disclosed that the Democrats knew about the unlawful surveillance program and the torture program for years but remained silent. Now, any investigation would drag in powerful members who are guilty by omission. Finally, Democrats knew that they have a monopoly in a two-party system and as the presidential race tightens, people will forget such things as torture and join the blue/red state fight. They are probably right.

By: Arabella

Arabella — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:23:53 +0000

“Mukasey knew that if he stated the obvious that he would implicate Bush and trigger calls for impeachment. Neither the Administration nor Democrats wanted that to happen.” –JT, above.

It seems a fact, based on evidence available, that, indeed Democrats do not want impeachment to happen. Can someone please explain to me WHY that is? In view of all the constitution-ignoring, war-promulgating, torturing, and even a database full of recorded false statements to the UN and the American people, what is the Dems’ hesitancy? Self-incrimination?