Dems still won’t outlaw “torture.”

A very true point by William McGurn: Now that Democrats have their coveted 60-vote majority in the Senate, why haven’t they legislatively banned and thus made illegal the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding?

Why indeed.

Over the past few years, the Democrats have moved to ban waterboarding only when it was clear that such a bill would not pass — or would be vetoed by George W. Bush. In September 2006, Sen. Edward Kennedy introduced an amendment to the Military Commissions Act that would have effectively defined waterboarding as a war crime, and it was defeated largely along partisan lines. In February 2008, when Democrats were in control of Congress, they made a big fuss about sending a bill that would have limited interrogation to techniques found in the Army field manual. They did so knowing President Bush would veto it, and that he had the votes to sustain that veto.

Today the Democrats have an even larger majority — plus a president who would sign such legislation. So why the call for a truth commission instead? The answer is a nasty one: If Congress made waterboarding illegal now, they would be making clear that it was not illegal before.

Andrew McCarthy is the former assistant U.S. attorney who put Omar Abdel-Rahman (the blind sheik) behind bars for the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Mr. McCarthy explained it this way to me: “When Senate Democrats didn’t have the votes, they voted to make waterboarding illegal. Now they have the votes, but there’s no effort to ban waterboarding. And the reason is that they are more interested in setting off a partisan witch hunt than passing a principled ban on something they say is torture.”