After temporarily forgetting about the 12:30p conference call, I phoned in just in time for the interesting stuff. One of the agenda items had been - should NRCAT (National Religious Campaign Against Torture) send a letter calling for the Attorney General Michael Mukasey to resign?
When I first read the agenda item, I thought it sounded a little extreme. The guy has barely been in office for 4 months, if that. He's danced around the torture issue, yes, (mostly by refusing to take an official opinion on waterboarding), but I had not dug deeper into some of his most recent opinions, and so I thought at first, we should cut the guy some slack - let's not get ahead of ourselves with this whole resignation thing.
The people on the call were thinking along similar lines. Some were concerned about losing legitimacy (as NRCAT is a rather young organization) by calling for an extreme action without any coalition supporting us outside of ourselves. Some were concerned that this attorney general is the best we're going to get, given our..broken...administration, and so rather than sacrificing Mukasey and the links he has to other issues in the DoJ that people are concerned about (within their own religious groups), we should not overstep and act too hastily.
As much as I see this logic, I was glad when someone on the call (from Austin) expressed her strong feelings that we, as NRCAT, should stand up to our calling as the moral clarifiers in this anti-torture movement to call Mukasey out and hold him to account for flouncing his responsibilities and defying the Congressional committees that questioned him.
Here's the thing: Mukasey said before the Senate Judiciary Committee that waterboarding is no longer part of the CIA's interrogation program. (whew). He also outlined the process by which such a 'technique' would be put back into an interrogation program: the head of the CIA would take it to the attorney general who would analyze the legality of such a technique, and then the President would decide whether or not to authorize it. So it would take a bit of work to put it back in.
General Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, has testified before Congress that the U.S. has waterboarded....oh but wait ONLY 3 highly important super-scary detainees, and it was a while ago. Therefore, ok, Attorney General Mukasey, oh pinnacle of legal opinion and keeper-of-the-U.S.-ideals-for-justice-and-virtue...could you give an opinion on the legality of this waterboarding, this same 'technique' that just a generation ago we prosecuted (and executed) some Japanese soldiers for having submitted U.S. prisoners-of-war to? Mukasey says -- no.
Mukasey believes it would be "irresponsible" to issue an opinion on a technique that people within his own department had authorized just 5 years ago. When asked by Rep. Conyers, who questioned him last week at the House Judiciary Committee meeting, if Mukasey would begin a criminal investigation into the usage of waterboarding in 2002-03, Mukasey bluntly refused. It would be "impossible" to have his DoJ staff investigate and prosecute people who had been following a DoJ legal opinion at the time.
Does this strike anyone else as inane? Far be it from the chief law enforcer of the country to ENFORCE some laws that his predecessors may have BLATANTALLY trounced on and received kudos for from our current administrative team.
To bring it back, NRCAT decided not to pursue the resignation [yet], in favor of strongly pushing for a Special Prosecutor (independent of the DoJ) who can investigate the destruction of several CIA interrogation tapes from 2002-03. (funny...Mukasey didn't really think there was a conflict of interest in getting a DoJ attorney to investigate the CIA tapes case which had authorizations coming from the DoJ - or alleged authorizations anyway).
The letter pushing for a Special Prosecutor will be sent again to Mukasey and copied to all the members of Congress. Some of us on the call encouraged the language to be strong and perhaps imply that NRCAT was taking issue with his flagrant fouls...kind of include a "watch yourself or else" component to foreshadow any future call for resignation that may come.
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