Patrick Leahy is stating he will not support President Bush’s nominee for Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, because “No American should need a classified briefing to determine whether waterboarding is torture.” Even though Mukasey has already stated he found waterboarding personally repugnant.
The issue is that Mukasey would not categorize waterboarding as torture. But let me break this down for you just a little bit and you will understand that Leahy’s position on this is hypocritical.
Let’s pretend for an instant that Michael Mukasey is the Attorney General. Now compare Mukasey and Leahy - side by side.
Defining torture - would that be a role for the person who enforces laws of the United States or the person who makes the laws of the United States?
Patrick Leahy is trying to foist his and his party’s inability to drive the definition for exactly what torture is onto Michael Mukasey. Additionally, this is exactly the same tactic Senator Leahy took with Attorney General John Ashcroft, while he was going through the confirmation grilling.
I think Senator Jeff Sessions’ statement in 2004 is as relevant today as it was during the Ashcroft confirmation process:
“…That is fact, and we know it. The rules of law and of war are a joke to the terrorists that we have captured and others still bent on attacking Americans. They care nothing about it. They make television movies of beheading people. That is what they think of the rules of law. So what we need to do is decide what is appropriate and what laws we are bound by, and we ought to set a good policy there. I would say this: The Senator from New York is a good lawyer. He has said in his own view that torture sometimes may be necessary. That is what Senator Schumer said. I think any Attorney General should properly advise any President of the United States in time of war on absolutely what the limits of his powers are. Those are things that maybe ought not be bandied around the world. It is hypothetical. You don’t know what the precise circumstances are. But the question that started all of this is abuses in prison in Iraq. The memos at the center of this debate have absolutely no connection–there is no connection–between what went on in Iraq and these memos, because our soldiers were operating under established policies of the military and internal discussions between the President and various lawyers, or memoranda they may have received from various lawyers. I want to say this about Attorney General Ashcroft. I was at the Judiciary Committee hearing when he testified. I saw him subjected to unfair abuse by former colleagues on that committee which was embarrassing to the committee. I don’t think I have ever seen in my experience in this Congress the kind of disingenuous and unfair treatment of a former Member of this body. It was not right. The ranking member was using the whole time to make a litany of distortions and charges against the Attorney General where he had no opportunity to answer them. He knew there was no way he could. It was not right. It was wrong. I said that then, and I say it now. He had no opportunity to respond to the ranking Member. Senator Leahy knew it, and said these things one right after another: You did this, you did that. They continued in that vein. The question here was, Oh, he wouldn’t define torture, yet he had a memorandum defining torture. That is not what Attorney General Ashcroft said. Go back and read the transcript. I saw what he said. Attorney General Ashcroft is a smart man, an honest man, and he answered the question directly. He said, Senator, the Congress defined torture. It is not for me to define torture. You define torture. The Attorney General doesn’t define torture. I am not defining torture. The Congress has already defined it. There is a statute. I have a copy of it here in which we defined it under certain circumstances. We set out an anti-torture statute….”
Even the Liberal Darling Blog, Daily Kos, gets this:
Dammit U.S. Senate, It’s Simple: Just Ban Torture
So why can’t Senator Leahy understand this - especially after having gone through exactly the same issue for confirmation of the same post only 3 years ago?
Well, that’s easy. Senator Leahy would not support the President’s choice for dog catcher because the President is a Republican and Senator Leahy is incapable if accepting responsibility for the inaction of himself and his party. In simplistic terms, the way lawmaking works is you gather the support necessary to pass your agenda item into law. The democrats have a majority, yet they are unable or unwilling to actually address torture except as a means to obstruct the work of the President. Senate Democrats like Leahy would rather spend time taking a stance on whether Turkey committed atrocities during the Ottoman period or not than to actually get down to the nitty gritty of their own rhetoric.
UPDATE: Betsy’s Page has a nice article on this topic as well.
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