Tomas de Torquemada is Running the Justice Department

We have had an impressively disturbing chain of AGs since the Bush Empire has been running things. John Ashcroft belongs to a church that prohibits dancing and favored rifling through libraries to root out seditious bookworms. But just when you thought it was safe to hate that guy, Alberto Gonzales comes along and makes him look like Robert Fucking Kennedy. Gonzales, the .22 caliber mind in a .357 magnum world, ran the Justice Department like Goebbles without the armbands and black leather. But Michael B. Mukasey, the latest incarnation of Bush's Judge Dredd, may take the cake. In a letter he wrote this week to the Senate Judicial Commitee, Mukasey claimed that while he certainly thought waterboarding would be torture if done to him, that didn't necessarily mean it was always torture.

The Spanish Inquisition provides us with the first documented use of waterboarding. Both the Kempeitai and the Gestapo used it in World War II, and we prosecuted them for war crimes citing waterboarding specifically. It's easy to buy into the whole "the world has changed since 9/11" rhetoric, but it's bullshit. It would be hard to find an American that couldn't list a litany of nefarious acts commited by the Gestapo that would make Al Qaeda look like the Peace Corps. At the Rape of Nanking in '37 Japanese soldiers tossed babies into the air and impaled them with bayonets, and the aforementioned Kempeitai engaged in everything from forced prostitution to biological weapon testing and medical experimentation on political dissidents. The kind of evil practised in certain quarters of Islam these days is nothing new.

What is new is our willingness to sacrifice our values to fight it. Sure, you can find incidents throughout our history showcasing lapses of morality on our part, but I don't know if has ever been institutionalized to the extent we see it today. Mitt Romney has actually refused to condemn torture, and he is using that disgusting bravado to bolster his foreign policy credentials. Mukasey has refused to label waterboarding as illegal torture. In his testimony, he talked about "shocking the conscience" of the interrogators, that there can be a balance struck between the level of shock an interrogator must endure and the quality of intelligence gained. This is the kind of moral relativism that our country has always found repugnant. It is easy to blame Jack Bauer for the tolerance we have developed, and for most of the bumbling masses maybe it is that easy to buy into the usefulness of torture. But Republicans spend a lot of time and energy crowing about liberals' moral relativism - maybe they should turn that big spotlight of self-righteousness on themselves.

In 1957, during the Algerian War, French journalist Henri Alleg was captured and subjected to waterboarding. Here is what he wrote about it.

The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. But for a while I could still breathe in some small gulps of air. I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn't hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. In spite of myself, all the muscles of my body struggled uselessly to save me from suffocation. In spite of myself, the fingers of both my hands shook uncontrollably. "That's it! He's going to talk," said a voice.
The water stopped running and they took away the rag. I was able to breathe. In the gloom, I saw the lieutenants and the captain, who, with a cigarette between his lips, was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw out the water I had swallowed.

Now we do this.