May 22, 2004
Dershowitz:
U.S. Needs Improved Torture Tactics HARVARD Law Professor Alan
Dershowitz, who urged that terrorists be
tortured in a Nov. 2001 column he wrote for the
Los Angeles Times, isn't backing away from
his position one bit in the wake of the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal. In fact, the noted civil libertarian said
Thursday [May 20,
2004] that the only thing U.S. did wrong
was to use tactics that were amateurish and
ineffective. "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," Dershowitz told MSNBC's "Scarborough
Country." Instead, torture of high value terror suspects
should be authorized by either the President, the
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Secretary
of Defense, he urged. Asked if he thought Americans were ready to "do
what it takes" to get information from terrorists
who threaten American lives, Dershowitz told host
Joe Scarborough, "I think so. But I think
Americans want us to do it smarter, want us to do
it better. We could have done it a lot
smarter." "If we were to limit our rough interrogation
methods to the most important, high-value
detainees," he said, the critics would be few.
"Nobody is complaining about what we have done to
[9/11 mastermind] Shaikh Khalid
Mohammed," he noted. The acceptance of
torture in the Khalid Mohammed case, said
Dershowitz, shows that "Americans are prepared
to go to extraordinary lengths to save American
lives and the lives of many others, as long as
we do it smart, and we do it with
accountability." And he challenged the claims by some pundits who
say torture almost never works because the subject
will inevitably say anything to alleviate the
pain. "We had a case in the Philippines where
[local police] tortured somebody and
revealed a plot to knock down 11 or 12 commercial
airliners flying over the Pacific and a plot to
kill the pope," he noted. And Dershowitz even defended sexual humiliation
as a good way to press Muslim detainees for
critical information. "It's a good thing to use women interrogators on
radical Muslim extremists," he told MSNBC. "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." The top legal thinker recommended that the U.S.
should unabashedly tell the world that torturing
high value terrorist suspects is justified "because
of the war that has been thrust upon us." "As long as we do it in a way that we can be
proud and hold our heads up and say, yes, we did
this," he told MSNBC. "But we have to be smart and
we have to have accountability." The world's terrorists, he said, have "put us in
a position where have to defend our civilians. And
that's the highest calling of democracy, to defend
its civilians against guilty murderers that are out
there trying to kill our grandchildren and kill our
children."  
Historic document's
text
Report
of the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) on the treatment by the Coalition Forces
of prisoners of war ... in Iraq-
[Updated:]
The
Classified Report of Maj. General Antonio M.
Taguba: Article 15-6 Investigation of the
800th Military Police
Brigade
[pdf,
85K]
-- see
the role of an Israeli-owned "civilian
contractor" interrogation firm, and a Mr "John
Israel"
-
Geneva
Convention (1949): The Protection of Civilian
Persons in Time of
War
[pdf,
108K]
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