Torturing the law

Earlier this month, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate had this to say on his blog at ThePhoenix.com about Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s testimony regarding waterboarding:

[A]cknowledging that the CIA’s torturers might have been acting in good faith — that they believed the lawyers when the lawyers told them certain highly coercive interrogation techniques were legal — hardly ends the inquiry. Why are these lawyers not being investigated in order to determine whether they wrote their legal opinions in good faith, or instead made up fanciful legal theories to appease the administration’s interest in taking the gloves off when it came to dealing with suspected terrorists?

And here we go, from today’s Washington Post:

An internal watchdog office at the Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration lawyers violated professional standards by issuing legal opinions that authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, officials confirmed yesterday.

Mukasey had a good reputation coming in, but was craven in his confirmation hearings and has been overly cautious in his subsequent congressional appearances. It looks like we’re going to learn what he’s really made of.