They Call It Horse Trading

Ted Kennedy, who I mentioned earlier in reference to NCLB, was nothing short of brilliant yesterday in smacking down the ridiculous rationalizations from torture-lovers Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer.

Schumer and Feinstein said they took solace in Mukasey's assurances that he would enforce any future waterboarding ban passed by Congress. That argument prompted a robust retort from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

"He will, in fact, enforce the laws that we pass in the future? Can our standards have really sunk so low?" Kennedy said. "Enforcing the law is the job of the attorney general. It's a prerequisite, not a virtue."

The answer, of course, is yes. Our standards have sunk deep to the bottom, and Congress has found themselves inadequate to the task of restoration.

As for this "new law" that is suddenly needed to ban waterboarding by the CIA, well, none is needed. Several international treaties and conventions as well as federal statutes already ban the practice. But if closing the made-up "loophole" that allows the CIA to continue the practice would work, then there's no reason to move forward on the Mukasey nomination until it's in place. Senators are certainly calling for a new law, and people like Huckleberry Graham SOUND good:

One of the most emotional moments yesterday came from Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a military lawyer who supported Mukasey but criticized his answers on waterboarding. Graham, who has frequently clashed with the Bush administration on interrogation and detention policies, said Mukasey is "a good man of the law" but also urged Congress to pass legislation specifically outlawing the use of waterboarding by all government entities, including the CIA.

"The world is not short of people and countries who will waterboard you. There's not a shortage of people who will cut your heads off in the name of religion," Graham said. "There is a shortage of people who believe in justice, not vengeance."

But once the "Torture-Haters Are America-Haters" rhetoric hits the Capitol, does anyone realistically think that they can get a 2/3 vote with significant Republican support? It's shameful for me to say "No." I think it's great that John Kerry wants to end torture, along with Kennedy and Biden and Reid and all the others. But the fact is that you have to use your leverage points, and the Mukasey nomination is it. Without such a bargain, we'll continue to read about moral depredations like this.

Sometimes the music was American rap, sometimes Arab folk songs. In the CIA prison in Afghanistan, it came blaring through the speakers 24 hours a day. Prisoners held alone inside barbed-wire cages could only speak to each other and exchange their news when the music stopped: if the tape was changed or the generators broke down.

In one such six-foot-by-10-foot cell in February 2004, equipped with a low mattress and a bucket as a toilet, sat a man in shackles named Ibn al Sheikh al Libi, the former al Qaeda camp commander described by former CIA director George Tenet in his autobiography last year as "the highest ranking al-Qa'ida member in U.S. custody" just after 9/11.

In this secret facility known to prisoners as "The Hangar" and believed to be at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, al Libi told fellow "ghost prisoners," one recalled to me for a PBS "Frontline" to be broadcast tonight, an incredible story of his treatment over the previous two years: of how questioned at first by Americans, by the FBI and then CIA, of how he was threatened with torture. And then how he was rendered to a jail cell in Egypt where the threats became a reality [...]

Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. ("I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al Qaeda," Powell said. "Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.")

But now, hearing how the information was obtained, the CIA was soon to retract all this intelligence. A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a "foreign government service" (Egypt) that: "the next topic was al-Qa'ida's connections with Iraq...This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story."

The lesson here is that torture is DESIGNED to extract false confessions, in this case providing a fake evidentiary basis for war with Iraq. Standing up against that takes more than filing a petition and trying to get 51 votes for a bill. It takes shutting everything down until this moral stain is removed.