Today, the United States Senate confirmed — by 53 votes to 40 — the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey as Attorney General. A few things stand out. First, only 93 senators voted. (The complete list is here.) Those who did not: Christopher Dodd, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Joseph Biden, Lamar Alexander, John Cornyn.
Disturbing fact: the first five on the list are running for President.
You might think it would be a matter of principle to record a vote against a man who refused to declare that waterboarding is torture. Here’s how the New York Times reported it:
Trying to stem the rising opposition, Mr. Mukasey said that while he personally found the concept of waterboarding repugnant, he could not pass judgment on whether it was illegal because he had not been briefed on administration interrogation techniques.
We live in an age in which people who want to be President, people who have sat on the Federal bench for nearly two decades, people who themselves have been imprisoned and tortured, are afraid to state the obvious. Americans torture: at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, at “undisclosed locations” around the world.
Some people have the courage of their convictions. They declare plainly (though wrongly) that torture is legitimate if it provides information that prevents greater harm. But a Mukasey does not even have the gumption to make that argument. Instead, he declares that he has not been briefed.
Now it seems to me that when people who take on positions of responsibility and trust declare that they cannot make a judgment because they haven’t been briefed, we ought to ask whether they are fit to hold office. No; that’s not quite right. What I mean is that someone who ducks responsibility on an issue like torture is unfit for public office.
In the past six years, we have let countless lies and countless acts of injustice go by. Few of us have said anything in public about these lies and acts of injustice. The cumulative effect of these lies and our silence is to corrode our sense of decency and destroy our dignity.
When we give in, a little bit here, a little bit there, when we cede ever more authority to shadowy men and women who declare themselves above or beyond the reach of the law, when we refuse to declare our indignation in public, when we pretend we have better things to do than exercise our rights and our votes, we collaborate in the destruction of our own principles and our own morality.
We may not see it, but something of us dies each time someone is tortured in our name. And that is what is so appalling about the absence of the five presidential candidates from the Mukasey confirmation vote.
Leave a Reply