Update on Mukasey's Tortured Response

With his once sure nomination as attorney general possibly hanging in the balance, Michael Mukasey has responded to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee about his equivocating on whether waterboarding is torture with further equivocating.

Mukasey declared Tuesday in a four-page letter that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques "seem over the line or, on a personal basis, repugnant to me" and promised to review the legality of such methods if confirmed.

But he told the Democrats that he still could not say whether waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was illegal torture because he had not been briefed on the details of the classified technique and did not want to suggest that CIA officers who had used such techniques might be in "personal legal jeopardy."

The Dems did not appear to be assuaged and a vote on the once slam-dunk nomination still has not been scheduled.

The White House has whined that Mukasey has been put in an untenable position, and there indeed is some political grandstanding going on here. But as I said yesterday, I also would say that a long overdue day of reckoning has arrived.