The Torturer's Apprentice

Amnesty International Executive Director William Schulz has a book review 
in this week's issue of *The Nation,* headlined "The Torturer's 
Apprentice," taking the "civil liberties champion" Alan Dershowitz to task 
for Dershowitz's endorsement of torture, provided the torturers have a 
warrant.  Schulz's piece is persuasive and good, although he falls a little 
short when asking why Dershowitz could advocate torture; Schulz thinks that 
"part of it may have to do with the philosophical basis for rights that he 
sketches in the beginning of his book."  More likely, it has to do with 
Dershowitz's fundamentalist Zionism, and his tortuous (pun intended) 
attempts to justify Israel's every raison d'etat.  Schulz's article has an 
especially illuminating quotation from Dershowitz that epitomizes the 
helpful "evenhanded" rationalism of contemporary liberalism in a way that 
would be impossible to imitate even in satire:

"[T]he warrant should limit the torture to nonlethal means, such as sterile 
needles being inserted beneath the nails to cause excruciating pain without 
endangering life."

Among other offerings in *The Nation* this week is a meandering, 
Jack-Daniels-inflected column from Christopher Hitchens, who notes 
(correctly) that "Nothing is more to be despised, in a time of crisis, than 
the affectation of 'evenhandedness'" and that, furthermore, "Facile 
equivalences are to be avoided."  The rest of the column is mostly a 
mishmash of just that, with Hitchens pretty much putting an equal sign 
between the Israeli offensive and the suicide bombers.  (Caveat: please 
don't waste my time by writing in and saying -- as if I didn't know this 
already -- that the suicide bombers deserve moral condemnation.  I think 
they do.  But Hitchens's "one the one hand, on the other" style of 
argumentation is tedious and wrong.)  Instead, the "facile equivalence" 
that Hitchens denounces is the one "between Sharon in Jenin and the 
international coalition in Kabul," the latter of which Hitchens claims -- 
in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary -- "easily made 
distinctions between killers and noncombatants and which still does."  He 
describes Washington's actions in Israel/Palestine as "dumb" and 
"unbelievable," rather than what they are: criminal.  For Hitchens, the US 
refusal to condemn Sharon and Co. is an insult to the moral righteousness 
of a basically good and decent superpower, rather than the to-be-expected 
outcome of longstanding imperial policy.  He retains an affectation of 
sympathy for the Palestinians, but has more or less become a liberal in his 
dotage -- or as Hitchens himself used to love to quote Gore Vidal in the 
case of Ronald Reagan, "the bright autumn of his senescence," which in 
Hitchens's case would more aptly be called "the middle-aged onset of 
scotch-induced dementia in  a formerly-bright but now comically 
personality-obsessed and fame-seeking gadfly scion of the British 
expatriate upper class."

John Lacny

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--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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