Waterboarding: Might Be Torture. Needs More Debate.

Really, it’s time for Diane Feinstein to step down and let a Democrat be Senator for a while.

UPDATE, November 8, 2007: The New York Times, with their fancy New York writers, has said this better. Read their editorial here.

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She’s one of two “Democrats” on the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted to send Michael Mukasey’s nomination as Attorney General to the full Senate for a vote. What good is it to give the Democrats a majority in both houses of Congress if they can’t grow enough spine to wield their power?

But I don’t mean this in a nasty, partisan, we-won-shut-up kind of way. I’m talking about morality here. Under questioning by the Committee, Mukasey could not bring himself to say that waterboarding (a brutal interrogation technique in which the victim believes he is drowning) is torture.

It’s against the law in this country. It’s against international law — we’ve signed a treaty stipulating that. What’s the problem with calling it what it is? The problem is we’ve been waterboarding our prisoners, and if Mukasey called it torture, he’d be bound to prosecute the war criminals — our people — who have been doing it. Crazy. Why would the Attorney General, the nation’s highest-ranking cop, NOT want to prosecute criminals?

Look, after Alberto Gonzalez, we don’t need another guy who wants to enable the Bush Administration in its race to completely destroy our government and our nation’s international standing. Waterboarding was invented during the Spanish Inquisition and has been widely used by the most unsavory regimes ever since. If Mukasey doesn’t think it’s torture… I say “Next candidate!”

To Feinstein, I’d say if you made a deal with somebody, sold your vote on this in order to get support for something else you’re working on, let’s hear about it. Maybe I’ll approve of your deal, maybe I won’t. But don’t hand me that horseshit about you don’t think a “leaderless department is in the best interests of the American people.” Jeez, are you affected by the writer’s strike, too?