Is waterboarding torture? Well America sure thought so in 1947.

During his confirmation hearings earlier this month, Mukasey said he believes torture violates the Constitution, but he refused to be pinned down on whether he believes specific interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, are constitutional.

“I don’t know what’s involved in the techniques. If waterboarding is torture, torture is not constitutional,” he said.

But after World War II, the United States government was quite clear about the fact that waterboarding was torture, at least when it was done to U.S. citizens:

[In] 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. “We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II,” he said.

All we need to do in this country is to remember that we are AMERICA!

We are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but goddamn it we believe in justice!

If we lose our sense of justice, we have lost the very soul of America.

I know that there are World War 2 veterans all over this country who simply cannot watch the television news anymore because it breaks their damn heart! What did they fight for? Well they sure as hell did not spend their youth in the army fighting the Nazis so that this pipsqueak George Bush could use Presidential slight of hand to take away the freedoms that they sacrificed their blood to give to EVERY American.