Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed last night at a Federalist Society dinner. As shown in the video below, he was caught by two nearby men who noticed him slumping at the podium.
He was rushed to our hospital at George Washington University where he reportedly made a quick recovery and received a call from President Bush.
Mukasey is 67 years old and it is not clear why he lost consciousness. The concern is that it seemed to have the characteristics of a minor stroke with the slurred speech. Hopefully, this was simply exhaustion and nothing more serious. Reports indicate that he is doing fine.
For the video, click here.
For the full story, click here.
It was a scary video to watch, but Mukasey is already out of the hospital and his office is calling it just a fainting spell. I hope they are right. I have witnessed people fainting and it never happened in the way Mukasey faded off and slumped, after he had trouble pronouncing a word. Jill is right that the Federalist are hypocrytical with their empathy for Mukasey, but they will allow and promote the rendition and torture of innocents.
Perhaps Mukasey just realized how far he strayed from the Federalists’ view of the Separation of Powers doctrine.
My disgust with the Federalist Society is that these are overwhelmingly people who believe that empathy, compassion and humanity have no place in Law. They’re not necessarily bad people individually, but they feel nothing but contempt for those outside their social class or religious belief. So as Jill points out, they can feel horror at Mukasey’s illness and react with compassion, but somehow lack the capacity to empathize with others not known to them. In the end, this is a group of decent people, who are ignorant of the evil they foster.
The video looks bad with him repeating his words and shaking before the collapse. My untrained eye says TIA or worse despite the assurances from his seconds.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear above. The article starts with the quotations “In a different Editorial…”
Per yesteday’s ruling from a column by g. greenwald: I guess what really bothers me is people at the federalist society said, “it was really difficult to watch” (muskasey’s collapse). Well of course it was, they were seeing another human being suffering. Why don’t they extend that same compassion to those people, many of whom are completely innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever, being tortured by this govt.? Why don’t those people count? There is something terribly wrong when only the suffering of someone you know matters and not only do you not care about anyone else, you don’t lift a finger to protest or right an injustice.
“In a different Editorial on the same page today, The Washington Post wrote about the five Algerians who were ordered yesterday by a federal judge to be released from Guantanamo after seven years in inhumane captivity as part of what The Post called “the utter travesty that is holding people with virtually no evidence — and certainly no evidence that can reasonably be considered reliable.” That is all part of the U.S. Government’s program to “detain civilians, take them to illegal detention centers and torture them.”
The five Algerians were joined for most of their stay at Guantanamo by Al Jazeera camerman Sami Al-Haj, who was abducted in 2001 while attempting to enter Afghanistan to cover the war there for Al Jazeera, imprisoned at Guantanamo without ever being charged with any acts of terrorism, questioned almost exclusively not about Al Qaeda, but about the work of Al Jazeera, and then, after more than six years, unceremoniously released with no charges or findings of any wrongdoing whatsoever. As Reporters Without Borders summarized:
Regularly tortured and subjected to close to 200 interrogation sessions by his jailers, Sami Al-Haj began a hunger strike on January 7, 2007, in protest against his detention and to demand that his rights be respected. In retaliation, his jailers force-fed him on several occasions. His lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, who visited him in July last year, said he had lost about 40 pounds and was suffering from serious intestinal problems. He was also subject to bouts of paranoia and was finding it increasingly difficult to communicate normally.
The same bipartisan political class which endorsed all of this and which — to this day — wants to deny detainees in U.S. custody any rights to challenge their detention in a court of law, now all agree in perfect unison that it’s time to let bygones be bygones; that any high U.S. officials who broke the law in spawning these injustices should be immunized; and that the crimes that were committed by government officials over the last eight years should be ignored.
cheney must have had him poisoned so bush could have him renew more recent unlawful orders while at the hospital.
(Sorry to be mean, but this man doesn’t care if people are tortured and I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for someone like that.)