So the new nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, isn’t inspiring a lot of confidence in the Senate, even amongst Republican members. He sounds like a plainer, lamer version of Alberto Gonzalez in that he believes the President has completely unlimited power, but doesn’t even have the imagination to creatively lie about it. When he was asked it waterboarding was torture, he said he couldn’t answer the question because he didn’t know if it was a technique we used. Which is neither an answer nor a reason to give no answer.

By that standard, it would be impossible to render any conclusion about anything that isn’t actually being done. Literally, you could apply that same standard to the question of whether flaying the skin off of someone’s genitals is torture – we don’t know if we do that or not. Or how about individually breaking every bone in someone’s body with an iron hammer? We probably don’t do that, so it’s impossible to determine if that would be torture. Electroshocking someone in the eye sockets? Eh, he’d have to see it a few times to tell you.

Of course, that’s the sarcastic interpretation of the answer. But the real interpretation, which is equally repugnant but far more duplicitous is that even though he knows it is torture, he can’t say it’s torture because as Attorney General he might have to defend the practice later. Since, you know, everyone knows that we waterboard people. Of course, it’s not as hideous as Gonzalez’s assertion that something isn’t torture unless it kills or maims you, but in Gonzalez’s defense, he’s never had to listen to himself give testimony, so he doesn’t have a relevant body of personal experience with what constitutes torture. The English language, on the other hand, knows the definition all too well by way of said testimony.

And while we are on the subject of waterboarding, a lot of people don’t actually know what that word means. Hell, it sounds kind of like an extreme sport – couldn’t you sort of imagine going waterboarding to cool off after base jumping? So here’s what waterboarding is. You get tied to a flat surface (the board) with your feet elevated and your head tilted backwards. Then they wrap your head in something – either a thick bag or a heavy cloth. So you can’t really breathe very well and you can’t see or hear too much, either. Then they either begin to dip your head into a standing pool of water or they begin to pour buckets of water onto your head. The cloth absorbs the water and begins to soak. So your head is trapped inside this wrapping which is quickly pooling with water. It prevents you from breathing, and you start to inhale water into your lungs. You gag, you begin to choke, and generally they don’t let you out until you’re right on the brink of drowning.

Of course, all of this is done after not having eaten for two days, being kept in an ice cold or bristlingly hot holding cell, and subjected to constant, high decibel sound to prevent you from sleeping. Oh, and you may or may not have had the shit kicked out of you before you got laid on the board. So really, waterboarding is just a very fancing term for drowning people, with the caveat that the person will usually be given air again at the last possible second. Usually. It was used by the Spanish Inquisition for frig’s sake. And hell, we literally treated the Nazis better than we treat our current prisoners – many of whom are guilty of nothing more than being swarthily skinned in the wrong century.

So Mukasey doesn’t know if that process is torture or not. In fact, he said he wasn’t familiar with what the technique entailed, which should have disqualified him right there. You know, for being a fucking liar. But he can’t make the determination on whether or not that process (a technique we have condemned other nations for using in the past, when we at least had some integrity) counts as torture, because he additionally doesn’t know whether or nor America uses it. And the definition of torture has become “whatever we don’t do” over the past few years. How about snapping off people’s teeth at the gumline with a rusty pair of pliers, and then pouring lye into the open wounds? Well, really, it’s not a determination that Mukasey could make without a briefing.

And even if that were true for the reasons that he implies, it makes him too much of a spineless pussy to be the Attorney General.

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