Bush’s nominee for Attorney General John Mukasey does not believe that “waterboarding” is either illegal or actual torture.
Let’s see, this is one form of “waterboarding”, better known around the world as Chinese water torture:
And this is another representation of the same form of torture depicted in a painting at the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The prison currently serves as a torture museum in memory of the thousands of victims of genocide in that country.
The goal is simple: fill the lungs of the victim with water to cause suffocation and the feeling of imminent death by drowning until the victim answers the interrogator’s questions. It leaves no scars or marks, and it can be repeated as many times as the torturers like.
Mukasey does not believe that this act is immoral, inhumane, illegal or even a form of torture.
If after knowing Mukasey’s position on waterboarding the Senate democrats still go ahead and approve his nomination, then we would have undoubtedly, both as a country and as a society, crossed a line into a very dark place where it will not matter anymore whether the next Attorney General is Mukasey or Pol Pot himself.