From Mukasey's Justice Dept oversight hearing today:
"Would wateboarding be torture if it was done to you?" Kennedy asked.
"I would feel that it was," Mukasey answered. He paused before continuing. "You say waterboarding is obviously torture," Mukasey said. The attorney general then disputed the bank-robbery analogy, saying that many intelligent people have taken opposite sides in the debate over the method's legality.
"I should not go into…the detailed way in which the department would apply general knowledge to a specific situation," Mukasey told him.
"Under what facts and circumstances would it be lawful to waterboard a prisoner?" Kennedy tried again.
Mukasey declined to take up hypotheticals: "I would be imagining facts and circumstances that are not present...Those eventualities may never occur."
"Are there any interrogation techniques that you would find to be illegal—fundamentally illegal," Kennedy asked.
.There are specifically barred techniques, Mukasey said. "We may not maim. We may not rape..."
"But waterboarding is not on that list," Kennedy cut in.
"It is not."