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The normal way to argue for the rule of law to be upheld is to argue that people don’t break the law, not that the law be changed to accommodate the law breakers. This argument is sophistry, pure and simple.
Would torturing one guilty terrorist to prevent the deaths of a thousand
innocent civilians shock the conscience of all decent people?To prove that it would not, consider a situation in which a kidnapped child
had been buried in a box with two hours of oxygen. The kidnapper refuses to
disclose its location. Should we not consider torture in that situation?Torture advocates always love to bring out the ticking time bomb as the Sensible Person’s We Can All Agree Torture Is OK example. And it’s pretty clear where Dershowitz is standing here. And so there isn’t a distinction between them and him, he’s saying, we should be torturing in this circumstance and we should be able to do so within a legal framework.
This isn’t hard to read. If you’re opposed to torture, you don’t write this sort of shit. You don’t fantasise about buried children, you don’t conjure up “torture warrants”, you don’t hem and haw and sow the seeds of doubt. You say torture is morally hideous and we shouldn’t entertain it under any circumstances. And this isn’t some kind of crazy extreme left position, it’s enshrined in international law and the Geneva conventions.
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Eejit
SwissChap
Well... or you can read it this way: he is arguing for the rule of law to be upheld. He's telling people that if they want torture, they should be honest about it and plainly state they want the law to allow torture (which, one might suspect, they would not actually want to do, as it makes them look bad). And conversely, if they don't want that, they should actually be against it, at all times. Avoiding the "winking an eye of quiet approval at torture while publicly condemning it".
As much as I am against all torture in all cases, that argument in itself is not a bad one - of course for me the logical and direct conclusion is that torture should just never happen, full stop.