Dershowitz: U.S. Needs Improved Torture Tactics

I'm pretty sure if we torture Alan Dershowitz long enough he'll admit to plotting to kill the Pope.

 

Dershowitz is a bad joke, and Harvard law sucks.

 

This makes me sick. It makes me sick that we do it and it makes me even sicker that it might be necessary for us to do.

 

I don't know...I really don't know.

I could see it in rare cases, but I have zero confidence that we (or anyone) can do it properly. Unless there is a ticking nuke, I'm totally against this. I'm actually shocked and disappointed that Dershowitz would advocate torture. The situation in Iraq has proven that when you allow torture, sadism takes over. One might note that Dershowitz isn't likely to be a POW anytime soon. I am very worried about the next American POW.

 

I don't trust the judgements made about the dangerousness about this or that particular prisoner. Yeah, some gubment yahoo says this guy is the next 9/11 ringleader but is he really? How does he know? What if he isn't? What if we torture some poor innocent dude because some incompetent government yahoo decides this guy is dangerous.

That's the part that bugs me. Thanks to Bush and his people I no longer have any trust in my government at all.

 

This is not the situation Dershowitz is talking about.

The people we're fighting against aren't going to behave any differently because we humiliated a bunch of prisoners. They already flew planes into buildings - how are they going to be meaner?

 

Not really the point. For one, "the people we're fighting against" just had a recruitment boost you couldn't pay for. Which means there is good reason to believe that brutality toward the people fighting this fight on our behalf is going to become a more pervasive factor in their daily contact with ... well, with everyone and anyone. For two and by extension, Ben's point is that brutality and torture are now a more common currency in this fight than it was before we came tumbling down off our (in any case precarious) moral high ground. Which means people on the ground (as opposed to, say, Harvard Law professors and/or the members of the internet chattering classes and/or witless, cowardly blowhards like Ian) are going to suffer horrific consequences should they be unfortunate to fall into the hands of our enemies. Or even, as is now tragically more likely, into the hands of vengeful but otherwise "ordinary" members of the populations of the places we have chosen to stage this fight in.

 

The answer is simple. Take no prisioners. Kill em all even if they look at you wrong.

 

The people who flew planes into airplanes weren't Iraqi.

 

I thought that was just a private guy -- we are talking about the movie, Airport, correct?

 

Agree and it's a fine line between doing it because we have to and doing it because we want to. What happend in Iraq is not defensible from that stand point.

 

Who did do this, and when did it happen?

 

But Dershowitz is not talking about torture as a common currency. THAT is the point. The more you talk about recruitment, etc... thanks to this military scandal the more you distance yourself from what he is talking about. And that is to use torture in very unique circumstances, on high level terrorists by men who are NOT going to take pictures and muck it up in general.

 

Dershowitz sums it up pretty well, there.

I really don't have a problem w/ this. Sadly, there is role for torture because of the enemy we are facing (also, in the case of Iraq, the enemy we've created).

 

LOL. There's a "... not a river in Egypt" joke in there somewhere ...

No, I know. Which is the single most obvious failure of his argument. When he speaks of "Americans being ready to do what it takes", he focuses on the "secret" torture of "high-level" enemies, as though that were the central point of torture as an issue. Which it is not. It is an irrelevance. It is an irrelevance whether or not the President authorises select torture by clever and discreeet sadists when torture as an issue in this conflict is defined and embodied by the torture practised by the likes of Pvt England and the other members of the trailer trash element of the US Armed Forces. THAT is the torture at the centre of this issue and THAT is a decidedly common currency.

"Americans being ready to do what it takes" amounts to having the stomach for pictures like those that sparked the Fallujah confrontation or, for instance, the pictures that so outraged the "civilised" world coming out of Mogadishu a few years back when dismembered Marines were dragged through the dirt in front of the world's media. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the highly specious assertion that the real test of this issue are the procedural niceties by which a handful of high-level enemies are tortured away from the eyes of the world.

 

Oh come on, yossarian, everyone knows Harvard Law is a silly place.

 

I'm sure O.J. Simpson would agree with his former attorney that a job not done properly is a job not worth doing at all.

 

Are you trolling? You would have us believe that (homo)sexually torturing Muslims and other indignities like forcing them to curse Allah and eat pork will not encourage anyone to support Al Queda? You can't be serious.

 

It's almost too ridiculous, but I think it's pretty obvious he is deadly serious. Let's face it, to be as stringent a cartoon conservative as "Ian" you need to have a pretty serious set of delusions on board.

But let's be fair here. "Ian" has always been meticulous about not making statements on the Internet without documented proof to fully substantiate them. That, after all, is how we learnt of Saddam Hussein's death, remember?

 

Well that clears things up.

There were fewer terrorist attacks in 2003.

Therefore, photos of Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners is not helping Al Qaeda recruit new members (in 2004).

That logic is pretty infallible, really.