The Congress is coming at Attorney General Mukasey pretty hard, as well they should.  In an exchange with Senator Biden, Mukasey basically told the Senate that the Detention Act’s “shock the conscience” language is basically all relative to the reason for torturing; that there is no hard-and-fast definition of that mandate and therefore no solid way to say that waterboarding is illegal.  And anyway, he insists the CIA isn’t doing it anyway.

Dick Durbin tried again to pin him down, and this time, Mukasey basically told him that the Congress would need to pass an entirely new law that specifically forbade waterboarding.  Can you imagine that this is the state our nation has come to?  We need a law to prevent torture.  Then, by all means, let’s have the law.