A persuasive argument

In which Alan Dershowitz loses the last vestiges of his credibility.

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president--indeed any leader of a democratic nation--would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

There are some who claim that torture is a nonissue because it never works--it only produces false information. This is simply not true, as evidenced by the many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.

See, it worked for the Nazis. Of course it will work for us. Next, we round up illegal immigrants and others without proper documentation and ship them via railroad to special camps set up in North Dakota. That technique worked out pretty well too.

(via Jonathan Schwarz at TMW)