Live Blogging Holder’s Confirmation Hearing
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More on Torture | 3:20 p.m. Torture — and waterboarding in particular — have so far dominated several of the exchanges between senators on the Judiciary Committee and Mr. Holder this afternoon. And even though Mr. Holder had emphatically declared that waterboarding is torture earlier today, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, tried to push the point a bit further with a hypothetical scenario.
Imagine, Mr. Cornyn suggested, a “ticking time bomb” scenario — terrorists were about to unleash chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that would cost “tens of thousands of lives,” and a detainee had information that would save those lives, would Mr. Holder still refuse to condone the use of waterboarding even if it were the only way to avert such a disaster?
While saying he was comfortable with Mr. Cornyn’s hypothetical, he disagreed with the premise that waterboarding would necessarily elicit reliable intelligence, citing many conversations he had had with experts in this area.
Separately, Senator Dick Durbin asked about other interrogation methods, like mock executions, in terms of whether they should be deemed torture. Mr. Holder said he wasn’t as conversant, but didn’t approve of tactics that would be construed as inhumane. (We’ll come back with a transcript on this exact exchange because Mr. Durbin cited specific techniques.)
Update from the transcript: The other techniques Senator Durbin inquired about were painful stress positions, threatening detainees with dogs, forced nudity, mock execution. He said that judge advocates generals had told me they would be illegal and violated the Geneva Conventions.
” When I asked Attorney Generals Gonzales and Mukasey the same question, they refused to respond,” Mr Durbin said. And then he asked Mr. Holder: “Would it be illegal for enemy forces to subject an American detainee to painful stress positions, threatening detainees with dogs, forced nudity, or mock execution?”
Because he wasn’t as familiar, Mr. Holder said he wouldn’t go so far as “to say that those constitute torture.” But, pointing again to the articles pertinent within the Geneva Convention, Mr. Holder noted they required for humane treatment of prisoners. That prompted Mr. Durbin to ask: “So in your mind they cross that threshold and become inhumane?”
And Mr. Holder replied, “I believe that’s right.”
On the practice of rendition, which gained considerable notoriety through the use of secret prisons abroad, Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, asked Mr. Holder his views: He said, “It simply should not be the policy or the practice of the United States of America to turn over a prisoner or captured person to a nation where we suspect or have reason to believe that person will be tortured.”
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Reckoning | 12:20 p.m. Words do often come back to haunt public officials, and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama has just asked Mr. Holder for a better parsing of statements he made in a speech to the American Constitution Society last year.
In a section critical of some Bush administration practices, Mr. Holder was quoted as saying, “We owe the American people a reckoning.” Mr. Sessions wanted to know whether those words indicated a willingness to prosecute government officials without knowing all the facts. “No senator, actually when I used that term — that’s gotten a lot more attention than I think it deserves,” Mr. Holder said in disagreement, adding that he wasn’t thinking about prosecutions but about “information-sharing” with the public.