To the Editor:

Re “Senators Clash With Nominee Over Torture and Limits of Law” (front page, Oct. 19):

Michael B. Mukasey, the nominee for attorney general, acknowledges that torture is illegal under national and international law. He will not say, however, what is or is not torture. This allows him to preserve the right to sanction torture by defining it as not torture.

But like pornography, torture doesn’t require a definition. The Mukasey nomination should be voted down. There must be one moral person in this country who qualifies for attorney general, and the Senate should hold out until this person is located and nominated by President Bush.

As an American citizen, I am tired of being disgusted with my government. We deserve better.

Mitchell Turker
Portland, Ore., Oct. 19, 2007

Note from KBJ: The letter writer needs to take a Critical Thinking course. He doesn’t know the difference between intension (connotation) and extension (denotation). Here is the definition of “torture” from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed.:

The infliction of severe bodily pain, as punishment or a means of persuasion; spec. judicial torture, inflicted by a judicial or quasi-judicial authority, for the purpose of forcing an accused or suspected person to confess, or an unwilling witness to give evidence or information; a form of this (often in pl.). to put to (the) torture, to inflict torture upon, to torture.

You will notice that no examples are given. That’s because (1) reasonable people can disagree about which techniques inflict “severe bodily pain” and (2) a given technique (such as waterboarding) may sometimes inflict and sometimes not inflict severe bodily pain. If we tie torture to a technique, or set of techniques, we limit our ability to extract information that may save hundreds or thousands of innocent lives. To his credit, Judge Mukasey refused to be drawn into this silly game by hostile, agenda-driven legislators.