Waterboarding For Thee But Not For Me

Mike McConnell is a professional liar. He's twice lied to Congress, openly, during the debate over FISA, mischaracterizing examples of surveillance to buttress Administration arguments. Now he's actually come to the conclusion that waterboarding would be torture for him but as long as you don't have a deviated septum and would actually be drowned, it shouldn't be much of a problem.

McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, was quoted in the New Yorker edition released on Sunday as defining torture as "something that would cause excruciating pain."

Asked if waterboarding -- the practice of covering a person's face with a cloth and then dripping water on it to bring on a feeling of drowning -- fit that definition, McConnell said that for him personally, it would.

"If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can't imagine how painful!" McConnell said in the article. "Whether it's torture by anybody else's definition, for me it would be torture."

But he rejected a suggestion that he personally condemned the practice [...]

"You can do waterboarding lots of ways ... I assume you can get to the point that a person is actually drowning," McConnell said in the New Yorker article, which paraphrased him as agreeing that this would certainly be torture.

McConnell said he could not be more specific because "if it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it."

One of the positive outcomes of the Mukasey/waterboarding affair is that you get these Bush Administration hacks, who are frightened of the prosecution they know they deserve, dancing on the head of a pin in ways that make Bill Clinton look like Abe Lincoln. They either try to split the atom like this and wind up looking foolish, or they speak the truth, which is at odds with Administration policy. An example is Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, calling for the closure of Guantanamo yesterday. Plenty of Bush Administration officials have said the same thing. For the future, it's good to have so many Republicans on the record on closing Gitmo and condemning waterboarding, or looking like idiots trying not to do so. When it's actually done by a Democratic President, they aren't really going to be able to protest.