Dershowitz on torture

Alan Dershowitz doesn't like torture. But...

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.

The kind of torture that President Clinton was talking about is not designed to secure confessions of past crimes, but rather to obtain real time, actionable intelligence deemed necessary to prevent an act of mass casualty terrorism. The question put to the captured terrorist is not "Did you do it?" Instead, the suspect is asked to disclose self-proving information, such as the location of the bomber.

One of the points made about SERE training, which does (or at least has) included waterboarding, is that the anti-torture laws of this country don't have an exception for training of our soldiers. If it's torture, it's banned. Period.

Another implication raised by SERE training is that if waterboarding is torture, then it works. If torture only produced false information, there'd be no need to train people to resist it.