From the issue dated September 6, 2002
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A Civil Libertarian Wants Professors to Talk About Morality and TacticsBy DAVID GLENNTerrorists are preparing to detonate a nuclear weapon in downtown Chicago. If FBI agents capture a suspect who they believe knows the weapon's location, should they be allowed to torture him to make him talk? Alan M. Dershowitz, the prolific Harvard Law School professor, believes we need to have public conversations about the moral trade-offs involved in fighting terror. In his just-released, 18th book, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge (Yale University Press), Mr. Dershowitz writes, "We must expand the base of people working on [preventing terrorism] to include people from the universities." Q. If you were a judge, what would you want to see from law enforcement before you'd sign a "torture warrant"? A. I find it hard to imagine that I would ever actually sign such a warrant. I use that concept in the book primarily as a heuristic to make clear that no torture should ever be permitted beneath the radar screen. ... I imagine the only case in which I would ever consider signing one as a judge would be one where the threat was very great -- the destruction of a city or a large area of a city, the certainty was very high ... and the torture contemplated was nonlethal. England is the only country that has ever tried to put [torture] under judicial control. I think when you compare England with France, where torture was not under judicial control, the French situation proved to be far worse. Q. There has been speculation in the press that the United States has "outsourced" the torture of Al Qaeda suspects to regimes in Egypt and the Philippines. A. Yes, and Congress, which loves to talk about everything, won't talk about this subject. ... If I had to describe myself, I would say that I am on the extreme side of being against torture, and those who won't talk about it are the ones who are guilty of silently tolerating it. And yet because the words "Dershowitz" and "torture" have appeared in the same article, magazines like The Nation love to say that Dershowitz supports torture, which is just a complete misreading of what I've been saying. It shows how difficult it is even for academics to raise extremely controversial subjects. Tenure, which is a license to be provocative, has rarely been used -- I think most professors shy away from this kind of controversy, where it's possible that students and others will misunderstand them. ... I've challenged a professor at the Kennedy School [of government] to debate me on this question, and he's refused to do it. Q. You write: "Not only must terrorism never be rewarded, the cause of those who employ it must be made -- and must be seen to be made -- worse off as a result of the terrorism. ..." But doesn't that framework hold social movements hostage to their extremists? Should the environmentalist or anti-abortion movements as a whole be punished for the actions of a few people on the violent fringe? A. My theory wouldn't apply in cases like that. For my theory to apply, the support for terrorism has to be central to the movement and has to be widely supported within the movement. That's why it applies paradigmatically to Palestinian terrorism. ... A fair reading of the history of the Palestinian case indicates that the support for terrorism has come from the top, and it's been approved from the bottom. It's both an elite and a grass-roots movement. And therefore it's the paradigm of a movement that should be set back. Q. Ethics aside, isn't it imprudent to "collectively punish" the Palestinians? A. You have to balance. What I don't like is the simple-minded person, whether he be a civil libertarian or from the religious right, who thinks that all considerations always move in the same direction. ... I teach a course on legal ethics and tactics, in which I have 15 problems. In every one of them, the tactical considerations point one way and the ethical considerations point the other way. And I make the students figure out how to weigh tactics and morality. That to me is what teaching should be about -- not making life simple, but exploring the complexities of the real world. http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 49, Issue 2, Page A7
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
