UK Independent:

Bush nominee passes "torture test"
Two leading Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, dropped objections to Mr Mukasey's nomination, apparently after a closed-door meeting in which he promised to uphold any future law passed by Congress explicitly defining one method, called water-boarding, as torture [Of course, waterboarding is already defined as torture.]

Good God. What have we come to? A nominee for the nation's chief law enforcement office promises to uphold the law, and this is news?

(As if Bush, operating under the carefully crafted Constitutional Theory Of We Get To Do Whatever The Fuck We Want would obey it anyhow. The "promise" is simply not Mukasey's to make, so far has our Constitutitional degradation progressed.)

Senators Feinstein and Schumer gave Mr Mukasey the green light after asking him what he would do if Congress passed a law giving explicit definitions of torture.

"He flatly told me that the President would have absolutely no legal authority to ignore such a law," Mr Schumer said. "He also pledged to enforce such a law and repeated his willingness to leave office rather than participate in a violation of law."

Critics said this assurance was virtually meaningless, because no law on torture was likely to overcome President Bush's veto power.

Well, it's a shame that Mukasey didn't say this in a public session, isn't it?

Besides, the critics are right. Bush would veto the law, or would render it meaningless with a signing statement, or would get Addington's office to write a memo gutting it, or would just ignore it. We're looking at a meaningless fig leaf, here.

And the worst of it all, is that torture is already illegal, and waterboard is already torture. We've already convicted people who practice it for war crimes.

The great shame, and the great sham, of this entire debate is that the Village has deployed so much tinsel on the question that people actually think there are two sides to the story.

Diane, Chuck: Nice work, selling out the country to war criminals. I'm proud of you. Now watch this drive.

NOTE Even better is how DiFi and Chuck sold out the other Democrats who finally got the courage to state the obvious. It's especially excellent that they totally undercut the chair of their own Judiciary Commmittee, Patrick Leahy, with their "private sesssion." But let's look on the bright side! Who says this Congress hasn't done anything? First, they condemned MoveOn. Now, they've normalized torture! Pretty soon they'll give retroactive immunity to the telcos! I'd say they're building quite a record!

UPDATE Andrew Sullivan on "enhanced interrogation techniques"--or, in the original German, verschaerfte Vernehmung. I can find plenty of disagreement with Bareback Andy on a whole host of issues, but on torture, he gets it exactly right.