The dead-enders are going to love this excuse:

The White House on Friday defended Attorney General-nominee Michael Mukasey’s refusal to say whether he considers waterboarding a form of torture, saying it is a difficult issue to discuss in public.

“These are complicated questions,” White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said. “Judge Mukasey, I think, did the best he could to be responsible in not talking about interrogation techniques which, as you all know, we decline to do.”

Nice one. Apparently the fate of the free world rests on not discussing before congress an opinion on a technique the Khmer Rouge embraced, despite me being able to find a description of it on friggin’ Wiki. If Teh Evildoers watch C-span, they can use a search engine.

Mukasey, a retired federal judge who has ruled in some of the nation’s highest-profile terror trials, frustrated Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday by repeatedly refusing to discuss the legality of specific interrogation techniques — including forced nudity, mock executions and simulated drowning known as waterboarding. Mukasey said he did not know if waterboarding is torture because he is not familiar with how it is done. (emphasis mine)

Ok, if you can’t even tell whether making someone who has already been subdued and isn’t an imminent threat to anyone at that moment think they’re about to join Michael Vick’s losing fight dogs is fucked, you really shouldn’t be near a position of authority. Besides, the administration has been weaseling around such arguments via rendition — stick ‘em in someone else’s custody for a bit, then claim to have no idea what they did to the suspect, despite the fact the person has no fingernails & confessed to something that happened before they were born — it’s not like they’re going to follow the law no matter what it is. Give your token denunciations, wait for the inevitable democrat roll-over, then show you were lying all along, it’s worked that way for the rest of the crew.

It’s the hypocrisy that hurts more than anything else. At least a conscious, open argument that it didn’t matter, while reprehensible, would be more honest. If the ruling regime is going to torture people & flush any semblance of moral high ground down the toilet, most they could do is look us in the eyes and admit it.