More on Alan Dershowitz and torture; my letter to the Wall Street Journal

Last week I posted about Liberal Democrat law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s op ed in the  Wall Street Journal Tom Faranda’s Folly: Dershowitz on the Democratic Party, terrorism, and torture.

Several letters were written to the Journal about his essay, and this morning Dershowitz responded with this letter in the WSJ:

Douglas A. Johnson premises his letter to the editor on Nov. 12 on the factual assertion that I am "passionately promoting the use of torture." Did he not even bother to read the column to which he was responding in which I stated unequivocally that "I am personally opposed to the use of torture." This assertion runs through all of my writing about torture. Being the head of a do-gooder organization does not give one a license to make up the facts.

I sent the following email letter to the Journal this morning – we will see if it gets published:

Alan Dershowitz letter this morning repeats a line he used in his op ed on November 7th that he is "personally opposed to the use of torture."

Yet the rest of his 1,465 word essay was an impassioned argument for why Democratic presidential candidates have to approve of torture so they can appear to be "strong as well as smart". And then he presents the "ticking time bomb" scenario as a situation where torture may be used. 

So while Dershowitz is "personally opposed to torture" –  evidently he would never torture anyone, in the same way that Mario Cuomo would never have an abortion – it’s acceptable in certain circumstances.

Mr. Dershowitz may be a liberal Democrat Professor at Harvard, but this is still dissembling, and his letter fails the smell test.