Senator Cornyn: Torture is Just a Theory

Today as I was driving to school around 6:00 pm, the broadcast of the Senate Judiciary Committee's confirmation hearing for Alberto R. Gonzales, our future Attorney General, I was lucky enough to hear a piece of testimony from the Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Hongju Koh.

Dean Koh argued forcefully that the President does not have the authority to override our laws forbidding torture nor do an end run around the Geneva Conventions. None of this discouraged Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas from stooping to the it's just a theory angle on the legality of torture. The sly senator wanted Dean Koh to accept the premise that laywers disagree in order to reach the ridiculously perverted if not pathetic conclusion that torture is not a question of legality, but merely of interpretation.