Attorney General Michael Mukasey has appointed a known supporter of the Bush administration’s torture policies as his chief of staff. Brian Benczkowski has previously argued that US interrogators aren’t practicing torture if they are solely acting to prevent an attack and not intending to humiliate or cause harm. In a previously undisclosed letter, Benczkowski writes: “The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.”