But Is It Torture?

A good many Americans, including our own attorney general, Michael Mukasey, claim to be utterly baffled by the question: Is simulated execution by drowning -- AKA waterboarding -- torture?

Well, maybe this little bit of history, courtesy of an NPR report on the subject, will bring them some clarity:

In the war crimes tribunals that followed Japan's defeat in World War II, the issue of waterboarding was sometimes raised. In 1947, the U.S. charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for waterboarding a U.S. civilian. Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor...

On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post ran a front-page photo of a U.S. soldier supervising the waterboarding of a captured North Vietnamese soldier. The caption said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk." The picture led to an Army investigation and, two months later, the court martial of the soldier.

So, AG Mukasey, it seems our government has regarded waterboarding as torture in the past. The question now, then, is pretty clear: Do you plan to uphold American law, or continue living in willful denial of it?