Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse jousted today with U.S. Attorney General Michael Bernard Mukasey over his refusal to make a legal declaration as to whether waterboarding amounts to torture.

The Rhode Island Democrat also criticized Mukasey’s insistence on attending to the Justice Department’s current and future operations, rather than digging back into how the Bush administration sought legal justification in past years for harsh interrogation techniques and other actions.

The exchange took place this morning during Mukasey’s second appearance as attorney general before the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Whitehouse is a member.

Whitehouse said he sees in Mukasey “a very pronounced reluctance to look backwards into problems at the Department of Justice,” adding that it is “highly inadequate just to look forward” because that stance does not ensure that “the mess” is being cleaned up.

Whitehouse sharply criticized the Office of Legal Council for its legal opinions justifying harsh interrogation techniques and other administration actions. That organization’s exaggerated claims of presidential authority and its “dramatic lapses of very basic” legal scholarship make it hard to avoid the view that it operated as “George Bush’s little shop of legal horrors.”

Mukasey replied that the Office of Legal Council has reviewed and reversed some of its legal opinions which makes it “self evident,” he said that the office isn’t “operating as somebody’s shop of horrors.”

–– John E. Mulligan, Journal Washington bureau

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