LIKUDNIK DERSHOWITZ ON TORTURE

Alan Dershowitz has an extremely precise mind but has shown a weak spot for anything that IN HIS VIEW seems to harm Israel. He recently wrote a piece for the WSJ's Opinion Journal that is an odd mixture of concern troll ("The party will lose the presidential race if it defines itself as soft on terror.", Godwinism ("many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.") and distracting hypotheticals ("But what if lawful interrogation failed to uncover the whereabouts of the suicide bomber?").

Dershowitz accuses the Democrats of making torture a partisan issue and inexplicably accuses them of adopting a "pacifistic stance." Well, it would be inexplicable if Dershowitz were HONEST but he's not. For example, he asserts that "tens of millions want the Moores and Sheehans of our nation as far away as possible from influencing national security policy." He cites no polls about this specific issue so I can only fill in what I know about the countries' attitude: About 50% of the country trusts the Democrats to handle Iraq and only 30% trusts the GOP. In addition, over 60% feel the Iraq War was a mistake. (ABC News/WaPo poll, 10/29 - 11/01)

In a narrow sense, it is probably true that 10s of millions don't want Moore or Sheehan near the national security decision making process but it is also true that a larger number don't want the neo-cons and the Likudniks near the levers of power. Dershowitz then points out that Giuliani is doing well with a broad segment of the population but fails to tell us that Giuliani's top advisors are neo-con war whores. Dershowitz can't seem to accept that Americans will no longer tolerate a foreign policy based on the Likud Party's goals.

Dershowitz does go on to make what I think is a sensible point but he does it by citing former President Bill Clinton: make a narrow law to cover the extreme "ticking bomb" scenario. He could've devoted his piece to a discussion of this idea instead of making a partisan attack on Democrats and liberals and the anti-war people who disagree with him. As he put it in the penultimate sentence: "The Democrats may lose the presidency if they are seen as the party of MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Dennis Kucinich and those senators who voted against Judge Mukasey because he refused to posture on a difficult issue relating to national security."