the rubber-stamping of mukasey, another shiv stuck in the heart of freedom

[sophiaserpentia]

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

source: Bush Administration Blocked Waterboarding Critic

How did the White House reward this intrepid and enterprising individual? By forcing him out of the Justice Department before he could finish writing his memo.

As Keith Olbermann put it (thanks novapsyche for the link):

The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

Four retired generals weighed in on the matter [PDF]:

...We write because this issue above all demands clarity: Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.

...This is a critically important issue - but it is not, and never has been, a complex issue, and even to suggest otherwise does a terrible disservice to this nation. All U.S. Government agencies and personnel, and not just America's military forces, must abide by both the spirit and letter of the controlling provisions of international law. Cruelty and torture - no less than wanton killing - is neither justified nor legal in any circumstance. ... Abu Ghraib and other notorious examples of detainee abuse have been the product, at least in part, of a self-serving and destructive disregard for the well-established legal principles applicable to this issue. This must end.

But will it end? Here's the punchline: the nomination of Mukasey for attorney general, after he could not, in the course of his role in covering the ass of George Bush and Dick Cheney, even admit to having thought about this question, has just been rubber-stamped by the Democrats.