>of course we're offended when our fellow
>intellectuals once again turn out to be the kind of
>prostitutes chomsky's been saying they are. yoo is
>just one of the crowd. i'm very disappointed alan
>dershowitz, opinionated professor of torture, is
>hiding out lately.
- No, he's not - last week's Times Higher carried an article by Dershowitz entitled: "When torture is the least evil of terrible options" <http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=2013664> (subscription required)
The US's refusal to openly debate the possibility of non-lethal torture led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, argues Alan Dershowitz.
[...]
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- The following story appears in this week's edition: <http://www.thes.co.uk/search/story.aspx?story_id=2013822>
Torture debate reignites academics' bitter feud
Paul Hill Published: 18 June 2004
A bitter row has reopened between two eminent Ivy League academics over whether governments should have the right to torture terrorist suspects under interrogation. Last week's Times Higher carried an article by Alan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard University, advocating "torture warrants" as a means of holding the authorities to account for use of non-lethal interrogation techniques. In a letter to the editor this week, Brendan O'Leary, professor of political science at Pennsylvania University, claims Professor Dershowitz has an "attention-seeking gene" that led him to "act shamelessly in the belief that all publicity is good publicity".
Professor O'Leary said: "At a time when most Americans are rightly ashamed of what has been done in their name in Baghdad dungeons, Dershowitz has chosen to repeat arguments which he has made before, and which have been falsified before."
In 2002, the two waged a war of words through The Times Higher Letters page over Professor O'Leary's review of Professor Dershowitz's book Why Terrorism Works, casting doubts on each other's motives.
In response to Professor O'Leary's letter this week, Professor Dershowitz accused him of preferring "ad hominem to argumentation". Professor Dershowitz stressed that he was advocating accountability rather than torture.
He said: "O'Leary is the best proof of the thesis of my article: that it is difficult to have a serious discussion about choices of evil without being accused of supporting one or both of the evils.
"His ideologically skewed anti-intellectualism should be obvious to any discerning reader."
Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, said Professor Dershowitz's idea of torture warrants was "ingenious" - but he was "worried about George W. Bush being the one to sign off on the permission to torture".
Professor Singer said: "Perhaps if permission had to be approved by both the President and the Chief Justice, and made public within a month of approval, it would be a sufficient constraint to ensure it would be used in a true emergency only, when the consequences would otherwise be catastrophic."
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Dershowitz is clearly interested in elevating torture to an ethical principle, something Slavoj Zizek urges us to guard against:
"If the choice is between Dershowitz's liberal 'honesty' and old-fashioned 'hypocrisy', we'd be better off sticking with 'hypocrisy'. I can well imagine that, in a particular situation, confronted with the proverbial 'prisoner who knows', whose words can save thousands, I might decide in favour of torture; however, even (or, rather, precisely) in a case such as this, it is absolutely crucial that one does not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle: given the unavoidable and brutal urgency of the moment, one should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very prohibition against elevating what we have done into a universal principle, do we retain a sense of guilt, an awareness of the inadmissibility of what we have done." - Are We In A War, Do We Have an Enemy (LRB, 23 May 2002)
Simon
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