Gus, did you see Alan Dershowitz on MSNBC the other night?
Might have been on Scarborough or Chris Matthews. (Edit- Yup. Scarborough. See below)
Dershowitz, a long-time champion of individual rights, believes torture is appropriate under certain situations (e.g., the "ticking bomb" scenario, as used by Israel). He also believes it is perfectly appropriate to exploit cultural biases and hang-ups on sex.
And, by the way, I have no problem with using their own sexism against them. It‘s a good thing to use women interrogators on radical Muslim extremists. I think it‘s a good thing to make them be stripped naked. I think these are legitimate forms of interrogation in cases where we have high-level prisoners who can provide high-level information
That said, Dershowitz does not endorse what happened at Abu Ghraib:
We should never do what we did at Abu Ghraib, which is turn a bunch amateurs with no experience on to a bunch of low-level detainees and tell them essentially, do what you have to do to soften them up.
That was the worst of all possible worlds. It was stupid. It was nonproductive. It hurt us. It didn‘t help us. If, God forbid, we ever had a situation where we really needed to get information to save lives from a very high-level person, the president of the United States, the second of defense or the chief justice of the United States ought to authorize it. We need visibility. We need an accountability and we need transparency.
The full transcript:
msnbc.msn.com
(for the Coulter-haters out there, the transcript contains discussion with her as well) |
