Bush in 1967 copped to branding at frat

WASHINGTON — Michael Mukasey, whose nomination as attorney general has now cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee, appears likely to survive a fuss over his unwillingness to say whether the interrogation tactic known as waterboarding — simulated drowning — is torture.

Mukasey told the Judiciary Committee he couldn’t answer the question because he’s not an expert on that technique. The White House has also refused to get into specific techniques, declaring simply that “we don’t torture.”

That’s pretty much what George W. Bush told the Yale Daily News in 1967 after the campus paper accused five fraternities of “sadistic and obscene” initiations. The paper, according to an account at the time in the New York Times, singled out Delta Kappa Epsilon for using a “hot branding iron” on the backs of new members. There was a photograph of one person with a half-inch scab on his back in the shape of the Greek letter Delta.

But former Delta President Bush, then a Yale senior, told the paper the fraternity used a hot coat hanger and “the resulting wound is ‘only a cigarette burn.’”