..out of the dark

..in the Wall Street Journal:

Democrats and Waterboarding
(The party will lose the presidential race if it defines itself as soft on terror.)

BY ALAN DERSHOWITZ
Wednesday, November 7, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
(...)

He [former president Bill Clinton] said Congress should draw a narrow statute "which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court." The president would have to "take personal responsibility" for authorizing torture in such an extreme situation. Sen. John McCain has also said that as president he would take responsibility for authorizing torture in that "one in a million" situation.

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president--indeed any leader of a democratic nation--would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

Ok..

So, let's recap: Dershowitz argues that, in order to have any chance to win, the democratic candidates - who are serious on national defence, and not insane like Kucinich and the ones calling for the impeachment of the entire White House for serious crimes - should embrace torture as a useful tool.

Let's go through that again - it would make sense politically, says Dershowitz, for any political candidate to consider torture legal under US law, if the president thinks it should be.

Actually, let's try again. Since the nazis were apparently successful in extracting information using torture - it should be the position of any serious democratic candidate for president, that the president should legalise torture in order to make use of this valuable tool "legally". And not - as "any other democratically elected" government would: simply condone and use torture in secret.

After all - hypocrisy is the ugliest word in the english language.

So let's be clear on this: the contention here is that unless the democrats embrace torture and limitless executive power - they have no chance to win the elections in 2008. Why, I would think it would be political suicide to ever suggest that the current torture issue - excuse me: the enhanced interrogation issue - where the president is allowed to decide what torture is, by law approved by Congress - that is just too weak and puny for real men (who think "24" is a documentary).

And let's just end, then, by noting that this is the moderate right position of the issue - where torture should be made legal, but only in specific circumstances deemed critical by the president. While the middle ground, where the entire Congress and the democratic party is (except for a few exceptions), is to just delegate the entire matter to the president, so he can define what torture is. While the extreme "left" position is that torture is abhorrent and should be illegal, like US law has dictated since "cruel and unusual punishment".

And in that respect, Dershowitz's column is both useful and valuable.