By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Alan Dershowitz said recent revelations about prisoner abuse in Bahgdad’s Abu Ghraib prison have “completely vindicated” his controversial calls two years ago for “torture warrants.”
“If before, any extreme means could be used,” he told JTNews in a phone interview from his Harvard University office, “there had to be explicit approval from the very top, either the President or the Secretary of Defense or the Chief Justice of the United States, none of this would have ever happened, because nobody would have approved this kind of thing.”
As it is now, said the Harvard law professor, a widely known defender of the First Amendment, civil rights and high-profile defendants, including Claus Von Bulow and O.J. Simpson, “there are no lines and there are no standards, and that’s the kind of abuse that we’ve seen become rampant.”
Dershowitz blamed the Bush administration for “publicly saying that they are opposed to torture, but then, with a wink and a nod, sending clear messages that the gloves are off and we have to do what we have to do. This way, they can all say, ‘We didn’t approve it.’ Yet [the May 9] Washington Post had a big story saying that, quietly, they did approve it.” [The Post article did not cover actions at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.]
He said that while he does not consider acceptable any level of mistreatment of prisoners to extract information, he thinks it is time for the nation “to have that debate” in an open and honest manner. Acknowledging that there is a reasonable argument to be made for using beatings and other types of force to get information that can “defuse a ticking bomb” (to use a broadly repeated phrase), Dershowitz said he believes the Israeli Supreme Court has struck the right balance, allowing some leeway in prisoner interrogations while holding Israeli soldiers and security officials accountable for the way prisoners are treated.
He also defended Israel’s decisions to target leaders of Hamas, saying that they had been directly responsible for ordering suicide bombings and other attacks on civilian targets. Those actions made them military combatants and legitimate targets in the ongoing war on terrorists, he said.
Dershowitz was scheduled as the featured speaker for a fundraising event in Seattle. Told by his doctor he could not fly, however, Dershowitz took to the air in another way, making a virtual appearance at the Northwest Regional Anti-Defamation League’s “No Place For Hate” luncheon on May 11.
Facing the audience from a pair of giant television screens in the Sheraton Hotel Ballroom, Prof. Dershowitz apologized repeatedly for the forced absence and promised to visit the Pacific Northwest in person as early as next month, after his doctors give him the green-light to fly again. The ADL’s regional director, Rob Jacobs, promised the audience that they would all be invited to a free get-together with the civil rights expert when he can make the trip.
On the question of support for Israel on college campuses , Dershowitz, who wrote his book The Case for Israel to address the subject, criticized his fellow academics for shirking their responsibility to speak out on behalf of Israel’s right to exist.
“The excuses that you hear all the time from faculty is, half of them say, ‘Look, we’re not experts on the Middle East, how can you expect us to sign petitions that talk about the Middle East?’” he said. “But then, the other half say, ‘We are experts on the Middle East and therefore we can’t speak out because our neutrality will be affected.’ Well, if you eliminate the people who are experts and you eliminate the people who aren’t experts, there’s no one left.”
Dershowitz praised a recent effort by Harvard University President Lawrence Summers to put the issue on the table.
“Larry Summers has been quite successful…. He made the speech at a church service at Memorial Church at Harvard. It had a big impact – it made students feel comfortable making those kinds of statements and it made faculty members wonder whether they’re on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of reality.”
Dershowitz characterized Summers’ remarks as saying that “criticism of Israel’s fine, it’s not anti-Semitic,” a position he has also endorsed himself. He noted that criticism of the government is routine in the Israeli press. But, he added, singling out Israel and making claims that are “all out of proportion,” while ignoring civil rights violations and atrocities in areas of the world like Sudan, sub-Saharan Africa and Tibet calls the real intentions of the critics into question.
“When I speak on college campuses all the time, I make the point that I’m pro-Palestinian, and I’m pro-Israel. I make the point that when the Palestinian leadership want their own state more than they want to destroy the Jewish State, there will finally be a two-state solution.
“We are winning the battle, believe it or not, on some college campuses among the students,” he said. “The ADL has done great work,” he added. “This is not a battle that’s going to be won overnight. I do believe that 75 percent of the students on college campuses around the country are open-minded.”