When you get right down to it, Michael Mukasey has refused to answer the question of whether waterboarding is torture for three reasons, which he provided in his letter to Senate Democrats earlier this week. Two of those are readily disputable (not wanting to tip off “our enemies,” for example), but the key to his rationale appears to be his expressed fear that the attorney general’s public acknowledgment that waterboarding is torture would place interrogators in “personal legal jeopardy.”
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=179459