Republicrats give thumbs up to torture

The Michael Mukasey affair proves once again that essentially one party rules America, the Republicrats. That one party, corporate and Establishment to the core, lends credence to the old lament that “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the Democrats and Republicans.
Mukasey, the newly anointed U.S. attorney general, refused to call a spade a spade: that waterboarding is torture. That stance alone should have disqualified him to be the high priest of the law.
But that’s all right in the view of supposedly liberal Democrats, Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Diane Feinstein of California. The shabby pair voted in the Senate Judiciary Committee with nine Republicans to confirm the torture-approver as head of the Justice Department. That left the eight Democrats on the committee opposing Mukasey twisting in the wind.
As The Nation wrote, Senate confirmation of Mukasey is “collusion by a majority of the Washington political establishment in a specific practice recognized as uncivilized since the Inquisition.”
Schumer again showed his Republicratism by opposing a tax increase on the unconscionable tax breaks for hedge and private equity funds. Why? Schumer is the chief fund-raiser for Senate Democrats. In the first nine months of this year these money barons gave $11.8 million to politicians.
Then there is Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, one of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination. He coddles the mining industry, defending the give-away mining law (passed in 1872) because it would “burden” the mining firms financially and cost jobs.
It is not surprising that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would defend the indefensible. He’s from the mining state of Nevada. But Obama is supposedly “a fresh face.”
Take trade. Many Democrats rarely have approved free trade deals because of their harmful impact on unions and the environment and their rightful opposition to globalization. But there was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently urging fellow Democrats to vote for still another trade deal, this one with Peru.
Or look at the retrograde appointees by President Bush to the federal courts. Despite a Democratic majority in the Senate, Leslie Southwick of the Mississippi appeals bench was confirmed for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
The Alliance for Justice issued a report showing that as a lower court judge Southwick was reactionary on worker’s rights, supported homophobic decisions and joined a ruling that took away an 8-year-old girl from her mother because she was a lesbian.
The two-party-is-one is an old political story. As far back as 1947 the Taft-Hartley bill to destroy organized labor became law over President Truman’s veto when 106 House Democrats and 20 Senate Democrats voted to override.
When it comes to Democratic presidential candidates, the difference with Republican candidates is negligible. Alexander Cockburn rightly notes in the book, “Dime’s Worth of Difference,” the issues on which there is two-party agreement: trade, big budgets for the CIA, swollen military budgets, toughness on crime, mandatory, harsh prison sentences, the ersatz war on drugs, corporate welfare, unilateral wars, Israel, demonizing of Castro and Chávez, and money corrupting politics.
Back to Mukasey. Waterboarding is torture--legally, ethically and morally. Indeed, a Japanese officer in 1947 was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for waterboarding an American citizen.
The War Crimes Act of 1996 makes cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees a federal crime, which is precisely why President Bush will not allow Mukasey to call torture, torture. Such an admission would put Bush in jeopardy of criminal charges.
Another reason Mukasey should have been rejected: his embrace of expanded powers for the executive. He said warrantless surveillance and “enhanced” interrogation techniques are constitutional. (Enchanced interrogation is one of the long list of government euphemisms that Orwell knew so well.)
Daniel Levin, while serving as assistant attorney general, wanted to see for himself what waterboarding was like. He found out at a military base: it was terrifying. His reward for bravery? He was fired by the White House, branded as “too independent” and someone who “couldn’t be counted on.” It has been ever thus in the Bush White House.
One other point: research clearly shows that torture gets people to talk, to plead, to break--but not to tell the truth.
Yet torture is OK with the Bush administration even though it is repugnant to what America is supposed to stand for.