What a surprise: more "revisionism" from Dershowitz about World War Two. When he was exposed as a plagiarist by Norman Finkelstein, he accused Finkelstein's late mother (a Holocaust survivor) of being a Nazi supporter.

awesome! (/sarcasm)
I guess many of the Jewish persuasion have come full circle! first they were killed by the Nazis, now they want to BE Nazis!

really, Jonathan, considering the source and who owns it now, are you REALLY surprised??
WSJ=Fox
knowing that, the self-loathing Dershowitz's screed is not surprising in the least. He probably wrote it just before Temple! lol

newsflash: alan dershowitz predicts george bush to commit suicide in bunker

Say what you will about that reasoning, but you have to admit that without all that torture, the Nazis probably would have lost. Er, lost more. I mean.

Nothing like jumping off the same cliff. (time to put on the brakes 1-202-225-0100 IMPEACH)

Klaus Barbie R us.

Swell.

Can't the HLS get him for moral turpitude?

Let's play along with the WW2 analogies, shall we? During the war, Julius Streicher wrote in his newspaper about how certain people were subhuman and should be tortured and killed whenever the state considered it necessary. William Joyce (AKA Lord Haw-Haw) advocated the torture and murder of prisoners over the radio. What happened to Streicher and Joyce after the war?

I know people see no merit whatsoever in Dershowitz's scribblings, but this one is the exception, since in any society with an actual system of justice, he just put his own scrawny neck into the noose.

The "winners" usually exempt those on their side from accountability for their war crimes, though.

Just sayin', you know, they didn't try Americans or Russians at Nuremberg.

doctorb Science is right in his first comment. It's pretty tough to find someone who used torture as a key part of a winning strategy. So the best we can hope for is some maybe, possibly, only-if-we-really-need-to, exceptionally rare, tactical victories? And in exchange we sell our soul? How foolish those Democrats are for rejecting that deal!

What if we were torturing former NFL stars who savagely murdered their ex-wives? I'm sure we would want to torture confessions out of them, right, Alan?

Sure, torture worked for the Nazis. When your main ojective is to kill millions of people and "win" at any cost, bad intel works just as well as good intel. It still furthers their objective of any excuse to kill more people.

"The "winners" usually exempt those on their side from accountability for their war crimes, though.

Just sayin', you know, they didn't try Americans or Russians at Nuremberg."

They didn't have to: 141 American soldiers, sailors and Marines were tried and hanged for war crimes including rape and murder.

Dershowitz teaches at Harvard Law. Bush went to Yale. Remember the good old days, when our elites were elite?

You mean those good old days at Harvard and Yale of private clubs (no Jews, blacks or women), drunken parties and lots of really funny jokes about those scholarship chaps who cleaned the toilets or worked in the dining halls? Good for some, they were.

Jelperman, even the Nazis tried their soldiers for breaches of what passed for discipline (except on the Eastern Front). The point is that Admiral Doenitz couldn't be tried for using submarines to attack civilian shipping -- which had been considered a war crime -- because Admiral Nimitz did it in the Pacific. Similarly, Marshal Goering couldn't be tried for terror-bombing of civilian towns, because Air Marshal Harris did it, in spades.

Little guys always take the pain for what the brass get up to.

You know, to think that Natalie Portman (aka Hershlag) worked as a research assistant for him on "The Case for Israel"...sigh Natalie, how are you gonna answer all the fanboys?

Of course this is a straw-man. No one says that torture always produces false information. They say that a) the information you get will in an unpredictable number of cases will be wrong b) when it is wrong, it will be what you want to hear c) if the "information" you get is what you want to hear, you're likely to i) believe it ii) try to use it as "evidence"

Oh, and d) it's fucking inhuman. But that's OK because JACK BAUER.

YET WE still keep paying for it to happen.(sez alot)

That torture is even a debatable issue in America says all that needs to be said, i.e. we have already become Amerika.

Lots of torturing that the Nazis did "helped" in one way or another. Medical science and space research were helped immeasurably by human experiments performed by the Nazis. If the end justifies the means, you have at least a shred of an argument for torture.

But the end justifying the means is an argument based on linear reasoning, which is not the only form of reasoning. Anyone seen a perfectly straight line in nature? Linear is a human construct. In reality, the means are the end...or at least define the end.

If you torture, in the end you are a torturer, regardless of what 'end' you would like to see yourself working towards. The final solution was a means to an end; many Germans supported the end, so they accepted the means. And the means say everything that needs to be said about the end.

If Dershowitz can support torture because sometimes it works, can he be far behind with support of genocide? After all, it sure got a lot of Native Americans out of the way.

It's not really fair to say Dershowitz supports torture. If you click the link to the original, he makes it abundantly clear that he does not personally support torture. However, I say "not really" because he is de facto supporting torture with his straw man (and other) fallacies and his political stands.

Oh, also, it's unfair to the Nazis to say they lost. They certainly would have "won" had they the chance to torture as many people as they'd wanted.

That torture is even a debatable issue in America says all that needs to be said, i.e. we have already become Amerika.

Once again, the sloppy "we" comes forth. Alan Dershowitz = America. What the rest of us have been up to, I have no idea.

jackpine savage,
Non-linear reasoning? Is that where your thoughts go all noodly?

SteveB, it isn't only Dershowitz who's been "debating" torture -- lots of liberal pundits have advocated it. (FAIR did a good article in 2002 or so, covering the discussion.) How many Americans have supported it I don't know, but it would be overreaching as far to say that "we" oppose torture as that "we" support it. A vote for George Bush in 2004 was certainly a vote for torture, though.

But of course, torture was used by the US long before the Bush Junta took over. See Al McCoy's A Question of Torture, for instance.

The Middle East's Only Democracy (copyright) learned a couple of other tricks from the Nazis: Collective punishment (Lidice/Gaza) and Einsatzgruppen counterinsurgency tactics (Warsaw ghetto/Jenin).