Dear Senator:
It is imperative that you oppose Michael Mukasey's nomination to be Attorney General, and filibuster if necessary. A man who refuses to condemn waterboarding cannot be trusted to uphold the laws forbidding torture.

There are so many problems with Mr. Mukasey's stance on torture that I barely know where to begin. The Attorney General is the top law enforcement officer of our nation. He is required to uphold the law, whatever the law says. He cannot pick and choose which laws to enforce and which to ignore.

For two hundred years, American law and policy has held that waterboarding is torture. As a former judge, it is unthinkable that Mukasey is unaware of this. Nevertheless, in his testimony before the Senate, Mukasey refused to disclose whether he personally believes waterboarding is a form of torture. This in and of itself shows that Mukasey is unfit to be the government's top lawyer.

Torture is forbidden by American law -- by the Eighth Amendment, by the War Crimes Act, by the Geneva Conventions, and by countless other laws regarding assault and battery. Nevertheless, early in the Bush Presidency, Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo and others wrote some ludicrous legal opinions claiming that some forms of torture, including waterboarding, weren't really "torture" and were thus perfectly legal. We saw the results of these legal opinions at Abu Ghraib, where 90% of the prisoners had been arrested by mistake and were innocent of any wrongdoing. Bush invaded Iraq and tortured innocent Iraqis -- and then was caught unprepared by the insurgency that resulted.

Regarding waterboarding, President Bush has said "the American people must know that whatever techniques we use are within the law." This is the same President Bush who claimed that the NSA always, always, always obtained a search warrant before wiretapping someone's phone, as the law requires. When the New York Times revealed that Bush had been lying -- he'd knowingly broken the law hundreds of times and then lied about it -- Bush then claimed that he'd been right to do so.

Waterboarding is a torture technique that was used by the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazis, and the Khmer Rouge. A prisoner is strapped to a table and placed in immediate and extreme danger of drowning. Waterboarding is employed to place the victim in such mortal fear that they will confess to anything in order to make the pain stop. Four hundred years ago, under threat of torture, Galileo was forced to recant his scientific conclusion that the Earth orbits the Sun.

Waterboarding -- and other forms of torture -- cannot be used to obtain accurate intelligence. Once broken under torture, a victim will say anything they think the torturer wants to hear, thus producing lies and fabrications. A CIA study earlier in the Bush Presidency demonstrated that those who volunteered to be waterboarded lasted for an average of fourteen seconds before they broke and would say anything to make the torture stop.

The laws against torture were written for a reason. Not only do they protect prisoners, but they prevent their captors from engaging in the inhuman practices employed by the Nazis. Say the President knows a suspect is a terrorist, and orders him waterboarded to extract a confession. What's to prevent the President from coercing a confession from a second man he only suspects is a terrorist? Where is the line drawn if the President needs a confession from a third suspect who might be a terrorist, but he has no proof? But what happens when it turns out that the first suspect who'd been forced to confess was an innocent man who was arrested in a case of mistaken identity?

In the United States, prisoners are guaranteed due process by the Bill of Rights. It is illegal to coerce confessions, and illegal to force someone to testify against themselves. Is it too much to ask our leaders to respect the Constitution under whose aegis they were elected?

The United States routinely condemned waterboarding when it was employed by dictatorships around the world.  We are currently fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- countries where they have no legal tradition banning torture. When the United States tortures prisoners, this will only encourage our enemies to capture and torture our soldiers -- after all, we'd do the same to them. Bush's illegal attempts to define some torture techniques as "not torture" have put our troops in terrible danger.

If an American pilot were shot down by Iran and forced to confess to nonexistent crimes through waterboarding, there is no question that the United States would agree that she'd been tortured. What is Bush's argument -- that it's not torture when we do it? Bush has said "It doesn't make any sense to tell an enemy what we're doing." Who is the enemy here? The United States Senate?

Mr. Mukasey has refused to condemn waterboarding. It is clear that he will follow his predecessor's lead: instead of upholding the law, he will try to find ways to help George W. Bush circumvent the law. Alberto Gonzales held that philosophy, and he resigned earlier this year under threat of impeachment.

Waterboarding is torture. It is illegal, immoral, and unethical. Those who torture are criminals. A man like Mr. Mukasey -- who believes the President has the authority to order torture -- is unfit to be Attorney General.  The President of the United States cannot order someone to break the law. Richard Nixon once claimed "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal" -- but even Nixon never did anything so monstrous.

Senator, we don't need yet another Attorney General who will help Bush when he wants to break the law. We need one who will stand up to Bush, and Mr. Mukasey is clearly not such a man. The Attorney General must uphold the Constitution, and he or she must prosecute anyone who commits crimes -- including the crime of torture.

The Senate must not confirm another Alberto Gonzales. We cannot trust the Justice Department to another nominee who doesn¹t care about the law.

Yours sincerely,

C. Colvin

CC: Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Congressman Steny Hoyer; Congressman George Miller