Tortured Democrats

Rich Lowry:

WOULD someone be fit to be attorney general of the United States if he had once said, "I think there are probably very few people in this room or in America who would say that torture should never, ever be used, particularly if thousands of lives are at stake"?

By the standard Democrats are using to oppose the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey as attorney general, the answer would be "no." In fact, whoever endorsed torture so explicitly would be relegated to the moral outer darkness.

Lucky for him, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who made the above comment during a June 2004 Senate hearing on terrorism, is a member in good standing of the Senate Democratic leadership.

Mukasey is not so fortunately situated. He's only a respected federal judge whose hallmark is a painstaking commitment to the law. He would never, as Schumer did, endorse violations of U.S. law, the Constitution and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Mukasey has been absolutely clear that torture is illegal and wrong.

But he won't say that the interrogation technique of waterboarding - which simulates drowning and induces instant, resistance-breaking panic in detainees - constitutes torture. On this basis, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), fulminated against Mukasey, "Will we join that gloomy historical line leading from the Inquisition, through the prisons of tyrant regimes, through gulags and dark cells, and through Saddam's torture chambers?"

Reasonable people can consider waterboarding torture, defined by federal law as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Obviously if waterboarding weren't so horrifying, it wouldn't break detainees so quickly. But common sense suggests that the practice belongs in a murky space short of unambiguous torture.

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What does common sense have to do with Democrats and an opportunity for political posturing where they can appear to be morally superior? It will be interesting to see if Chuck Schumer will join his roommate Dick Durbin in the terrorist rights pander lobby. Since Mucksey was Schumer's nominee that may be hard to do, but we have seen him do worse. Schumer must feel like he is being waterboarded at this point.