There was a very impassioned letter posted to the No Quarter website regarding the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey to the position of Attorney General:
Urgent: Letter from Intelligence, Military, Diplomatic, and Law Enforcement ProfessionalsAnd it has your usual signatories, Joe and Valerie Plame, Coleen Rowley who spent a lot of time with Cindy Sheehan plus other double-good citizens. Thanks to A Confederate Yankee, we learn a little bit about Constitutional Law and the powers available to the Attorney General:
A group of distinguished intelligence and military officers, diplomats, and law enforcement professionals delivered an urgent message this morning to the chairman and the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, calling on them to hold the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey until he takes a clear position on the legality of waterboarding.
Their message strongly endorses the view of former judge advocates general that waterboarding �is inhumane, is torture, is illegal.� The intelligence veterans added it is also a notoriously unreliable way to acquire accurate information.
They noted that the factors cited by the president and Mukasey as obstacles to his giving an opinion on waterboarding can be easily solved by briefing Mukasey on waterboarding and on C.I.A. interrogation methods.
The intelligence veterans noted that during their careers they frequently had to walk a thin line between morality and expediency, all the while doing their best to abide by the values the majority of Americans have held in common over the years. They appealed to Senators Pat Leahy and Arlen Specter to rise to the occasion and discharge their responsibility to defend those same values.
Some of the names you know well, such as Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. Some are minor luminaries such as Johnson and Rowley, a famed FBI whistleblower who later sat ditchside with Cindy Sheehan and ran for Congress as a Democrat. The rest my be outstanding in their field, but are not household names.My thoughts -- waterboarding is heinous. It tricks the body into thinking that it is drowning and can be very disorienting (Google if you want some more -- there is a lot of fact, there is a lot of fiction. I was trained as a biologist and know some of this stuff...) Still, as he said, it is not illegal, it is not fatal, it is not painful, it is only disorienting and you throw up a lot and I could see its use if there was someone who we knew had information that could be used to save lives.
They signed on to a letter confronting Senators Specter and Leahy over the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey to be the next Attorney General, because these intelligence operatives did not like Mukasey's refusal to comment on the legality of waterboarding.
They do not seem to grasp the basic fact that the Attorney General has no dictatorial powers, and does not make laws.
I have a further newsflash for Mr. Johnson and the rest of his ill-informed posse: waterboarding is not illegal.
The United States Congress (both houses Democrat-led) has not passed a law outlawing the waterboarding of terror suspects. Despite any personal feelings Mukasey may have that waterboarding is torture (and indeed, I think most of us agree it is), it would be irresponsible for a candidate for Attorney General to declare this or any other action illegal that Congress has not made illegal.
If Johnson, et al do not think the practice of waterboarding is justifiable even in extreme circumstances to save thousands of American lives, then that is their issue to take to their fellow Democrats in Congress, but it is not an issue on which Mukasey should comment, at least not until he has clear legal authority to act upon it.
