From The Guardian UK
By Jedediah Purdy

The US senate judiciary committee has drawn a line in the water – and is holding it. Before the committee’s Democrats approve Michael Mukasey’s nomination for attorney general, they want to know that he believes waterboarding is torture under United States law. Simulating drowning to get terrified detainees to speak, a favourite technique of the Khmer Rouge, strikes many as a paradigm of torture. If it isn’t torture, what does the word mean?

This is about more than a terrible practice. It’s about the integrity of the elite lawyers who assess the president’s power – who answer to the attorney general. We recently learned that at the end of 2005, while Congress was preparing to pass a ban on “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners, those lawyers were crafting secret opinions holding that none of the CIA’s interrogation techniques violated that standard. The memos remain secret – itself a serious problem for the rule of law – but they seem to have been classic legerdemain, playing with definitions to rob words of their meaning. Any first-year law student learns how to do this. At some point, she also learns that, although the trick is easy to do, personal and professional integrity make it inappropriate, especially for a government lawyer assigned to say what the law means. The political loyalty that the Bush administration demands evidently overrode that standard, just as it overrode the longstanding justice department practice of not firing federal prosecutors in the middle of their terms for showing insufficient partisan zeal. This administration sometimes seems to treat law the way a tax-dodging corporation does, as nothing but an obstacle to its goals.

Elite lawyers are not exactly poster-children for a human-rights campaign. This administration is often contemptuous of professionals, with their refined training and esoteric norms. That isn’t a hard attitude to cop. Lots of Americans already believe the same, and many lawyers at least halfway believe it about themselves.

But really believing that would be poisonous.

Read more Drowning