Clinton endorses torture in special cases?

Dershowitz Experiences The Clinton Double-Standard First-Hand

Alan Dershowitz, writing in the New York Sun, complains of a double standard applied by the media to him and Bill Clinton. Dershowitz elicited a wave of criticism and outrage when he argued that American law should set up a narrow exception to the laws against torture in order to allow accountability for it. However, when Bill Clinton made the exact same argument during an NPR interview, the media never bothered to report it:

In a recent interview on National Public Radio, Mr. Clinton was asked, as someone "who's been there," whether the president needs "the option of authorizing torture in an extreme case."

This is what he said in response: "Look, if the president needed an option, there's all sorts of things they can do.Let's take the best case, OK.You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that's the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or water-boarding him or otherwise working him over. If they really believed that that scenario is likely to occur, let them come forward with an alternate proposal.

"We have a system of laws here where nobody should be above the law, and you don't need blanket advance approval for blanket torture.They can draw a statute much more narrowly, which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court." ...

For suggesting this approach to the terrible choice of evils between torture and terrorism, I was condemned as a moral monster, labeled an advocate of torture, and called a Torquemada.

Dershowitz makes his astonishment clear. Clinton argued not just for a legal opening to authorize torture -- not abuse, not coercive techniques, but the legal ability to "work over" terrorists -- but also to allow the executive to cover itself with an ex post facto warrant from the FISA court. That would allow the President to conduct torture illegally but then cover him/herself afterwards by getting FISA judges to provide cover. Dershowitz didn't go that far in his own argument; in the "ticking time bomb" scenario, he would still have required the warrant to be secured before the torture.

The Harvard law professor complains about the double standard applied to the Clintons, and worries that the silence means the debate on torture has closed. On the first score, all this conservative can say is: welcome to the club. After all, this is the same President and political party that pushed for excessively burdensome sexual harassment legislation that allowed for all sorts of unreasonable discovery, taking political advantage from the aftermath of the Clarence Thomas smear campaign, and then howled loudly and successfully when Paula Jones applied it to him. This is the same President who has convinced a majority of Americans that his impeachment for perjury, a crime against the Constitution, represented a historical defense of it.

But thaty's hardly the end of the hypocrisy. After all, Congress just passed a bill, signed by President Bush yesterday, that explicitly authorizes the tough interrogations of terror suspects that has stopped at least eight terror attacks on America and American assets. It does not authorize torture and requires interrogators to adhere to the McCain Amendment which prohibited torture.

How did Senator Hillary Clinton vote on that bill? She opposed it, along with 32 other Democrats. Bill Clinton's party screamed loud and long about how the bill enabled torture and departed from the Geneva Conventions. Russ Feingold described this legislation as "a stain" on our history, one we would regret, and soon. Yet none of these Democrats had anything to say when their last occupant of the White House not only endorsed torture but also a protocol for covering one's butt after the fact.

Double standard? We've been dealing with it for years. Welcome to the club, Alan. The T-shirt is on its way.