{"id":4054,"date":"2007-11-14T09:34:35","date_gmt":"2007-11-14T09:34:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=4054"},"modified":"2025-09-30T01:47:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T01:47:15","slug":"more-on-alan-de","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/?p=4054","title":{"rendered":"More on Alan Dershowitz and torture; my letter to the Wall Street Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I posted about Liberal Democrat law Professor Alan Dershowitz&#8217;s op ed in the&nbsp; Wall Street Journal <a href=\"http:\/\/tomfaranda.typepad.com\/folly\/2007\/11\/dershowitz-on-t.html\"><strong>Tom Faranda&#8217;s Folly: Dershowitz on the Democratic Party, terrorism, and torture<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Several letters were written to the Journal about his essay, and this morning Dershowitz responded with this letter in the WSJ:<\/p>\n<blockquote dir=\"ltr\">\n<p class=\"times\" style=\"MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px\">Douglas A. Johnson premises <a class=\"times\" href=\"\/article\/SB119483209796389667.html?mod=article-outset-box\">his letter to the editor<\/a> on Nov. 12 on the factual assertion that I am &quot;passionately promoting the use of torture.&quot; Did he not even bother to read the column to which he was responding in which I stated unequivocally that &quot;I am personally opposed to the use of torture.&quot; 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"times\" dir=\"ltr\" style=\"MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px\">I sent the following email letter to the Journal this morning &#8211; we will see if it gets published:<\/p>\n<p class=\"times\" dir=\"ltr\" style=\"MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px\">\n<blockquote dir=\"ltr\">\n<div>Alan Dershowitz letter this morning repeats a line he used in his op ed on November 7th that he is &quot;personally opposed to the use of torture.&quot;<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>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 &quot;strong as well as smart&quot;. And then he presents the &quot;ticking time bomb&quot; scenario as a situation where torture may be used.&nbsp; <\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>So while Dershowitz is &quot;personally opposed to torture&quot; &#8211;&nbsp; evidently he would never torture anyone, in the same way that Mario Cuomo would never have an abortion &#8211; it&#8217;s acceptable in certain circumstances. <\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Mr. Dershowitz may be a liberal Democrat Professor at Harvard, but this is still dissembling, and his letter fails the smell test.<\/div>\n<p class=\"times\" dir=\"ltr\" style=\"MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px\">\n<p class=\"times\" style=\"MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px\">\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week I posted about Liberal Democrat law Professor Alan Dershowitz&#8217;s op ed in the&nbsp; Wall Street Journal Tom Faranda&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4054"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9374,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4054\/revisions\/9374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}