Terrorism: November 2007 Archives

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?

... when she writes:

These days, you can forget that old-style GOP rhetoric about "values," "human dignity" and the "culture of life." Because the GOP has a new litmus test for its nominees: Will you or will you not protect U.S. officials who order the torture of prisoners?

But I increasingly fear she's right. Especially when she cites examples like this:

As Scott Horton reports in his Harper's Magazine blog: "Several days before his first meeting with the Senate Judiciary Committee, Michael Mukasey's Justice Department handlers arranged a private meeting for him with a number of 'movement conservatives.'... They pushed aggressively on the torture question. They wanted Mukasey to pledge that he would toe the administration's line" by not criticizing the administration's approval of waterboarding and similar interrogation techniques, and they wanted him to "protect those who authored the [interrogation] program" by issuing opinions that would keep those responsible for the program from facing criminal prosecution.

There's a lot at stake in next year's election, includuing the very soul of the GOP.

According to the latest terrorist cyber-chatter, al-Qaida has its sites on L.A. this holiday season, our malls in particular. Should this be a surprise?

We all too easily forget that well before 9-11, Islamic terrorists tried to take out LAX in the fortuitously foiled "Millennium Bombing." Then there was the jihadist wannabe who shot up the El Al ticket counter at the very same airport. Clearly America's entertainment capital is a target, and what bigger bulls-eye could there be than one of our decadent mega-malls at the busiest time of year?

Not that there's much that can be done with these warnings. We have little choice but to keep on with whatever we're doing, while remaining "vigilant." But with or without the latest alert, it's no secret that Los Angeles needs to be on guard. And we must remember that America's war with radical Islam isn't just some faraway abstraction. Without so much as moment's notice, it could quickly come to dominate -- or end -- our very lives.

30 years ago... my, my, how some things never change!!

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. That's the best way to sum up the situation for Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan right now. Musharraf says he had to declare a state of emergency -- suspending the constitution, ousting the chief justice, blacking out independent media -- because Islamic extremists have spread across the country, infiltrated Islamabad and endanger national stability. Those reasons are all true, and dangerously so. But they're also not things that have happened in the past week. As I wrote back in a July column, Musharraf's containment policy of "see no evil, hear no evil" with the al-Qaida and Taliban sympathizers in the North West Frontier Province has been a miserable failure. But even then, when making the decisions that have come back to haunt him, he was pressured to not piss off the populace too much, because he risked driving Pakistanis into the arms of the anti-U.S. Islamist Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal coalition that would enforce Sharia law with a vengeance.

Musharraf is heavy-handed and has no problem acting like a jackass. He's also mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore, particularly as his rule is threatened by the chief justice who, Musharraf states, has headed a court that's freed 61 terrorists. Again, that's not a stretch to believe. It's not easy to cast judgment on Musharraf in the middle of such a mess. After all, the alternative to Musharraf and Bhutto (who also recently narrowly escaped death in a bombing that killed scores) is havoc, oppression, and summer camp for terrorists -- not tucked away in Waziristan.

You either surf, or you die. That'll have those landlocked trainees from Afghanistan singing like canaries!

We can give Michael Mukasey this much credit: Unlike Alberto Gonzales, he isn't a liar. When it comes to the subject of torture, he's not lying -- he's just evasive. So, in at least this one respect, he would be an improvement at the Justice Department.

But that doesn't mean he's fit for the job.

Mukasey finds his nomination in peril because he has been trying to do before the Senate what the Bush Administration has done for years before the American public -- deny charges of torture by redefining the term. It's a Clintonian type of word-parsing with horrific implications: "We get to define the word 'torture.' Our definition excludes anything we do. Therefor, we do not torture."

If only we all could take such liberties with the language: "I wasn't speeding, officer. It was an enhanced driving technique!"

So Mukasey plays dumb on the question of waterboarding, pretending that he doesn't know whether simulated execution by drowning qualifies as torture. That way, should he get confirmed, the administration can keep on doing it, and he can say, with a straight face, "We don't commit (what I have on the record defined as) torture."

Lest anyone, like Mukasey (or Rudy Giuliani), harbor any doubt as to the morality of waterboarding, consider what Sen. John McCain -- who knows a thing or two about torture, has to say on the subject:

... if you gave people who have suffered abuse as prisoners a choice between a beating and a mock execution, many, including me, would choose a beating. The effects of most beatings heal. The memory of an execution will haunt someone for a very long time and damage his or her psyche in ways that may never heal. In my view, to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture

That Mukasey is unable or unwilling to say as much means he's unqualified for the office he seeks. It is the attorney general's job to define the application of the law. Mukasey's refusal to do so in this instance will only foster a climate of lawlessness, which is the last thing you want out of any elected official, let alone the nation's top lawyer.

And President Bush's defense of Mukasey -- "It doesn't make any sense to tell an enemy what we're doing" -- is preposterous. Bush says all the time that we don't torture. Is that telling the enemy "what we're doing"?

Well, in a sense, it cold be -- if Bush were actually telling the truth.