Mukasey's confession

At first glance, it's an extraordinary confession:

Kennedy: Even though you claim to be opposed to torture, you refuse to say anything whatever on the crucial questions of what constitutes torture and who gets to decide the issue. It's like saying that you're opposed to stealing, but not quite sure whether bank robbery would qualify. ... [You] also ignored the fact that the CIA continues to use stress positions, sleep deprivation, other techniques that are every bit as abusive as waterboarding, techniques that our own Department of Defense has rejected as illegal, immoral, ineffective and damaging to America's global standing and safety of our own servicemen and women overseas.

So I won't even bother to ask you whether waterboarding counts as torture under our laws because I know ... that we won't get a straight answer, so let me ask you this: Would waterboarding be torture if it was done to you?

Mukasey: I would feel that it was.

Now, I realise the game that Mukasey is playing here. He's implying that whether or not he or Kennedy would feel that they had been tortured, wouldn't necessarily mean that torture had actually taken place.

It's the disgusting conundrum that the torture supporters find themselves in. Were it to be done to them, they know fine well that they would feel that they had been tortured, for the very simple reason that they would have been.

However, Mukasey continues to argue that people of "equal intelligence" and "equal good faith" have differing opinions on this matter. Now, I would argue against the intelligence - and certainly the good faith - of anyone who advocates or defends a technique that has been considered torture since the days of the Spanish Inquisition, but there is something else going on here. It is the kind of American exceptionalism espoused by Giuliani on this subject when he stated:

It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it."

"It depends on who does it". With these words Giuliani exposes the infantile logic behind the pro-torture argument. For it is simply impossible to imagine Mukasey or Giuliani ever making the case that waterboarding was not torture had that action been carried out by Saddam on, say, Jessica Lynch. Under those circumstances the fact that waterboarding constituted torture would be obvious for all to see.

However, if this technique is carried out by the "good guys" in different "circumstances" - i.e. to stop a bomb from killing many - then Giuliani and Mukasey start to find things much more ambiguous.

There is no need to point out the glaring hypocrisy behind this argument, it is there for all to see: the notion that something is legal if we do it but illegal if done to us is so fantastically infantile that it almost melts upon any contact with reality.

And yet that is seriously the argument that people of "equal intelligence" and "equal good faith" are purporting to make. It's hideous.

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Tags: Mukasey, Kennedy, Giuliani, would waterboarding be torture if it was done to you?, torture, waterboarding, CIA, war on terror