Mulling Mukasey

Obsidian Wings:

None of the statements that I’ve read today give me any real information or reassurance about what he will do as Attorney General. Not without a specific denunciation of the 2004 and 2005 OLC torture memos; or a willingness to say that specific techniques like waterboarding, hypothermia, and painful stress positions are banned; or a pledge to release the publicly release the legal justifications for “enhanced interrogation” & wireless surveillance instead of treating the administration’s constitutional law arguments as state secrets. The statements that “I categorically denounce torture,” “the United States doesn’t torture,” “torture is antithetical to our values”they are meaningless from members of this administration. It’s past time for the press to learn this, and to stop writing credulous headlines about how the “Attorney General Nominee Rejects Torture.” But I doubt that’s going to happen when the Democrats abdicate and fail to ask hard questions.

Amen to all that. And: sigh.