Last month, President Bush’s nominee for attorney general claimed improbable ignorance about the brutal interrogation procedure known as “waterboarding.” And since he supposedly knew so little about it, Michael Mukasey told irritated lawmakers at a confirmation hearing on Oct. 18, he could not say whether it amounted to torture.

In fact, he piously declared, it would be irresponsible for him to offer an opinion.

The most charitable explanation for this performance is that Mukasey is a profoundly incurious man.

Waterboarding, after all, has been much in the news – for years. And right at the center of many of those news stories has been Alberto Gonzales, the very man for whom Mukasey now offers himself as a suitable successor.

So even if Mukasey had never developed an interest in this controversy before he was nominated for attorney general, what’s his excuse for failing to get up to speed once he knew he was headed for a confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill?

Mukasey had to know he would be asked about waterboarding, a practice that the CIA reportedly used at least through 2005.

In the Oct. 18 hearing, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, tried his best to help out the ostensibly befuddled nominee by explaining what the technique involves:

“Do you have an opinion on whether waterboarding, which is the practice of putting somebody in a reclining position, strapping them down, putting cloth over their faces and pouring water over the cloth to simulate the feeling of drowning – is that constitutional?”

(My only quibble with that wording is the phrase “simulate the feeling,” which is understated. The victims are in fact drowning – they are sucking in water rather than oxygen – and would presumably die if that continued for long without a break.)

It seems ridiculous to say that this treatment doesn’t amount to torture.

Certainly there is no doubt about this in the mind of Sen. John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate who suffered torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam:

“Anyone who says they don’t know if waterboarding is torture or not has no experience in the conduct of warfare and national security,” McCain said recently.

In the hearing, though, Mukasey played dumb even after he had the procedure spelled out for him: “If it amounts to torture,” he said, “it is not constitutional.”

Note the wiggle word “if.” It leaves open precisely the question that Mukasey was being asked.

Whitehouse pronounced himself “very disappointed in that answer.” It was, the senator said, “purely semantic.”

“I’m sorry,” Mukasey replied.

Not sorry enough.

The true test of an apology is whether the offender actually does anything to remedy the offense. And on Tuesday, Mukasey issued a written response to lawmakers’ questions that merely offered more evasions.

He did say that waterboarding was “on a personal basis, repugnant to me.” But he refused to acknowledge that this repugnant activity was in fact torture. Instead, there were just more meaningless semantics: “Hypotheticals are different from real life.”

He said he would need more briefings and so forth.

The torture issue now appears to be holding up his confirmation. The nominee has had two weeks to learn all he needs to know. By now he should recognize that such interrogation tactics violate federal law, international human rights standards and traditional American values.

Until he’s figured that out, it would be irresponsible for members of Congress to confirm him as the next attorney general.