Michael Mukasey – unfit to be Attorney General

Let’s be clear about what water boarding is. You take a human being and strap them to a board. You then either dunk their head in water repeatedly or you pour vast amounts of water directly into their face. Or, if you use the method favored by the Inquisition at one point, you pour water onto rags you’ve stuffed into their mouths and down their throat. Helpless, the victim chokes, gags and panics. That fundamental, hard-wired, biological terror that accompanies the sense that you can’t take a breath kicks in.  This is done not once, but over and over as the victim becomes increasingly weak.

Survivors have reported that water filled their mouth, throat and lungs. The pressure, according to one survivor, was so great that he thought his eardrums would burst.  While being subjected to this treatment, people pass out. Repeatedly. They are revived only to have to endure the treatment again. They don’t just come to believe they are going to drown. They do begin to drown.

In fact, the sense of drowning is so strong that an excellent case could be made that water boarding is a kind of particularly cruel mock-execution in which the victim not only suffers the psychological fear of death, but experiences much of the physical pain as well.

For a man who wishes to be the chief law enforcement officer of this nation to refuse to state without equivocation that such treatment is torture is unacceptable. For the Justice Department to be lead by someone whose sense of justice is so perverted by political considerations that he cannot testify under oath that water boarding is a violation not only of international and federal law, but also of basic human decency is obscene.

Please. Right now. Call your Senators and tell them to refuse to confirm Mukasey.