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Dems Get Ready to Install Torture Defenders as New Atty General
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
World Socialist Web Site - Oct 20, 2007
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/oct2007/muka-o20.shtml
Senate hearings on Mukasey nomination
Democrats prepares to install defender of torture,
illegal spying as attorney general
By Bill Van Auken
This weeks Senate hearings on the nomination of Michael Mukasey as US
attorney general made clear that the Democratic leader****p is preparing
to install as the countrys chief law enforcement official a right-wing
former judge who backs the illegal methods of the Bush administration
in its so-called war on terror, including torture and domestic spying.
Bush nominated Mukasey to replace Alberto Gonzales, his former White
House counsel, who resigned as attorney general in August amid a
mounting crisis over the politically motivated firing of nine US
attorneys and his role in pu****ng through a secret warrantless domestic
wiretapping program.
The two days of testimony given by Mukasey before the Senate Judiciary
Committee have established that whatever differences he may have in
terms of style or ability, Bushs new nominee will maintain fundamental
continuity with the policies of his predecessors, Gonzales and John
Ashcroft.
On the eve of the hearings, the chairman of the judiciary committee,
Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat, Vermont), told re****ters in
Wa****ngton, I would expect him to be confirmed. He added: I like
Judge Mukasey. I want him to succeed.
Indeed, on the first day of the nominees testimony, the Democratic-led
panel was described by the Wa****ngton Post as generally friendly,
while the New York Times re****ted that Democrats kept their questions
polite and the banter cordial throughout the day. Indeed the
committees chairman, Leahy, set the tone by threatening protesters
from Code Pink that they would be thrown out of the hearing after they
raised signs calling for the shutdown of the Guant!namo prison camp.
In the course of this first days cordial encounter, Mukasey defended
the right of the US president to seize US citizens and detain them
without charges. He was asked by Senator Diane Feinstein (Democrat,
California) about his own ruling in the case of Jose Padilla, in which
he ruled that the president as commander-in-chief had the power to
decree the detention of US citizens. He cited as legal justification
Congresss own vote to authorize the use of military force in the wake
of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In answering Feinstein, he pointed to the Supreme Courts decision in
the Hamdi case. When Feinstein pointed out that she was referring to
the seizure of citizens in the United States, while Hamdi was detained
in military operations in Afghanistan, Mukasey expressed the opinion
that the Hamdi decision left open the question of where the
battlefield is and who defines the battlefield.
Asked about the Guant!namo detention facility, where hundreds of people
have been held without charges or trials for years, Mukasey lamented
that it had given the US a black eye in terms of world public
opinion. But he added, I cant simply say we have to close Guant!namo,
because obviously the question then arises what we do with the people
who are there. And there is now no easy solution to that.
In terms of international law, there is an incontrovertible solution,
which is to either charge and try those detained for crimes, or release
them. Mukaseys answer made it clear that he sup****ts a continuation of
the present illegal setup.
Also in relation to Guant!namo, Senator Dick Durbin (Democrat,
Illinois) recounted an earlier discussion with the nominee in which
Mukasey expressed his contempt for the rights of those imprisoned
there. Guant!namo, he told the senator, was used as a fright wig by
critics of the administration, but the detention camp was humane and
legal. Detainees there, he told Durbin, get three hots and a cot,
healthcare better than many Americans and taxpayer-funded Korans.
Mukasey stood by this statement, telling the panel, I dont think
people are mistreated there. Asked whether imprisoning people for
years without charges did not constitute mistreatment, Mukasey replied,
What one regards conversationally as mistreatment or not, I think, is
probably in the eye of the beholder. Whatever ones opinion, he
insisted, doing so is legal.
Questioned by Leahy whether the president could authorize and legalize
torture, Mukasey insisted that torture is illegal and not what this
country is about. He was asked about the 2002 Bybee memo, which
claimed that the president as commander-in-chief had unlimited powers
in time of war, including that of overriding laws, both national and
international, barring torture. It also defined torture so narrowly"as
equivalent to inflicting pain associated with major organ failure or
death"as to permit a broad range of torture methods.
Mukasey declared the memo worse than a sin. It was a mistake. By
which he meant that the memo was legally flawed and
unnecessary"certainly not a crime. He contrasted it to a subsequent
torture memo that narrowed substantially the basis for authorizing
methods beyond, perhaps different from, those that may be contained in
the Army Field Manual. Under that memo, torture was continued.
Finally, questioned on the Bush administrations warrantless
surveillance program, conducted in violation of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, Mukasey allowed that the president could
not legally sanction a violation of the law, but quickly added that
there exists a gap between where FISA left off and where the
Constitution permitted the president to act. The clear implication was
that as commander-in-chief, the president has the power to override or
ignore the law in the name of conducting war.
Only on the second day of the hearings, however, was Mukasey subjected
to any probing questions. Much was made in the media about the nominee
having struck a different tone, as the Wa****ngton Post put it.
Leahy insisted that on a number of your answers yesterday, there was a
bright line on the questions of torture and the ability of the
executive or inability of the executive to ignore the law. That seems
nowhere near as bright a line today.
To use Mukaseys phrase, the brightness must be in the eye of the
beholder. In point of fact, he was saying virtually the same thing on
both days. The well-publicized clash on Thursday between Mukasey and
Democrats on the committee seemed far more likely a result of
Democratic concern that the excessively affable character of the
previous session had exposed their own subservience to the Bush
administration and its repressive policies.
On Thursday, the nominee was asked directly whether waterboarding"a
technique in which prisoners are strapped to a board and subjected to
simulated drowning"constituted torture. Mukasey claimed in his
response, I dont know whats involved in the technique.
He added, If waterboarding is torture, torture is unconstitutional.
This empty semantics is more or less the flip side of Bushs claim that
we dont torture.
While some Democrats fulminated over Mukaseys failure to answer, a
White House spokesman defended his response, declaring that he was not
in a position to discuss interrogation techniques, which are
necessarily classified. As the Wa****ngton Post pointed out,
waterboarding has been a known practice"banned and prosecuted as
torture in US military courts"since the Spanish-American War.
Mukasey also amplified on his answer regarding FISA and the warrantless
domestic spying, holding that the president does have the power to
ignore a law if it impedes the exercise of his authority as
commander-in-chief during wartime.
The president doesnt stand above the law, he said. But the law
emphatically includes the Constitution. The answer amounted to an
implicit defense of the core legal argument made in defense of all of
the criminal actions of the Bush administration, from torture, to
domestic spying, extraordinary rendition and detention without charges
or trials.
The nominee also sup****ted the White Houses claim that executive
privilege can be used to cover communications that do not directly
involve the president, an argument used to stonewall congressional
investigations and defy subpoenas, particularly in the case of the
fired US attorneys. He also indicated that as attorney general he would
not seek to enforce contempt citations against members of the executive
branch who refuse to testify before Congress.
Despite the verbal sparring, there was no indication that the Democrats
will oppose Mukaseys nomination. Hes at least answered the
questions, which is better than his predecessor, said Leahy, referring
to Gonzales, who deflected questions from the same committee by
repeatedly claiming he could not remember. Hes going to be different
than Gonzales on all the issues. He will certainly be better than
Gonzales on morale.
Mukaseys views are hardly a mystery. He spent 18 years as a federal
court judge, including 6 as chief judge of the federal court in
Manhattan. In the 1970s, he was a federal prosecutor, working with
Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, with whom he remains
close both personally and politically.
He has repeatedly expressed his contempt for democratic rights and his
unconcealed loathing for those who have challenged the repressive
policy of the Bush administration. In a Wall Street Journal opinion
column last August, he advocated the creation of a special national
security court system to incapacitate dangerous people without
having to observe the niceties of constitutional rights, appeals or the
principle that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty.
As a Manhattan federal judge, Mukasey presided over a number of cases
involving those who were illegally rounded up and imprisoned by the FBI
in the wake of September 11 based solely on the fact that they were
Muslims or from Arab countries.
In one such case, a lawyer representing a Jordanian detainee brought
before Mukasey in October 2001 told the judge that his client, marched
into court in shackles and an orange jump suit, had been beaten by his
jailers while in custody. Mukasey brushed off the protest, declaring,
As far as the claim that he was beaten, I will tell you that he looks
fine to me. So much for his feigned aversion to torture.
In moving toward Mukaseys confirmation, the Democratic leader****p in
the Senate is once again exposing its complicity in the wholesale
assault on democratic rights unleashed by the Bush administration over
the past six years. It sees in the ex-federal judge a more competent
executor of this same basic policy.
*
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