You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at Jkfitz42@cs.com. This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.
If Bush’s poll numbers hold up, this group of critics — Charles Schumer, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle, for example — will change their tune. Wait and see.
But there have been some surprises on this issue. People who have never taken a law and order position in their lives are calling for a get-tough approach toward accused Islamic terrorists. Such as? Well, the dean of the “criminal as victim” school of thought: Harvard law professor and omnipresent television talking head Alan Dershowitz.
If you asked most Americans to come up with the name of a champion of the “rights of the accused,” odds are they would name Dershowitz. In one high profile case after another — O.J. Simpson, Klaus von Bulow, Jonathan Pollard — Dershowitz was there, on the evening talk shows, using every arrow in his quiver to disarm the police and prosecutors, in the name of protecting the Constitutional rights of the accused.
Well, now he wants to torture the accused. No exaggeration. Literally, torture them. In his syndicated column, Samuel Francis reports on Dershowitz’s speech at a book fair at the Jewish Community Center in St. Louis in late October. Hold onto your hat. Dershowitz is now convinced that “Even torture may not be off the table as an information-gathering tool” when dealing with suspected Islamic terrorists. He wants to do the torturing rationally, of course: “There must be a national debate about the circumstances in which torture is permissible and who should have the power to decide when to use it.” Okay…
You say, what? That you agree. Well, maybe I do too. I am not sure. Give me the right scenario — say, solid information that a detained illegal alien has information about another terrorist attack such as the one that took place on Sept. 11th — and I would find a way around the 5th Amendment restrictions against self-incrimination. But I am not Alan Dershowitz. I haven’t made a career out finding every loophole — real or contrived — to prevent the police from using the words of a defendant against him in a trial. What’s going on?
They say a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. The terrorist strike against the Twin Towers may have been Dershowtiz’s mugging. Probably for the first time in his life he has had to confront the impact of his legal theories — on himself, on himself personally, not in the abstract. After all, Dershowitz could have been in the Barnes and Noble in the Twin Towers for a book signing when they were struck. And anthrax spores can’t be packaged so as not to infect the mail of leftwing professors at Harvard. There are sacrifices we must pay to protect our civil liberties — and there are sacrifices that ask too much. We now know where Alan Dershowitz draws the line. Samuel Francis calls Dershowitz a “fraud.” Well, that implies that Dershowitz made a calculated decision to flip-flop. I am open to the suggestion that it may have been something else: a dose of fear at work on his psyche. A tremble is an involuntary reaction.
Whatever — this is a teachable moment for the country. It demonstrates once again that when leftists talk of “individual rights” and the “rights of the accused,” they are talking about the rights of fellow leftist dissidents. Their goal is to free up the left to maneuver within society. It is a strategy they use to weaken traditional values and beliefs, for the purpose of replacing them with their own. Once they accomplish that goal — once they shape a new consensus and take hold on power — they lose their devotion to the rights of dissenters.
Check the record. The champions of free speech who marched and protested in defense of Stalinist professors, who rallied behind Timothy Leary and the Black Panthers, became the guardians of political correctness once they took control of the faculties at our major universities. They now prohibit racially offensive language and behavior that offends gays and feminists and other favored minority groups.
It is the same dynamic that explains why the ACLU did not burn the midnight oil to come up with a defense for the neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and white parent groups protesting busing for racial balance. It also explains why the free-thinkers, who excoriated Christian parents for daring to threaten the academic freedom of high school biology teachers who taught Darwin’s theories, now use their power as department heads to exclude any mention of creationism from high school textbooks.
The pattern is obvious. The left champions the rights of the individual, the accused, and a free exchange of ideas, until they take hold of the reins of authority. Then they will crack the whip — literally, we now learn, on accused Muslim terrorists, if Alan Dershowitz has his way.
But doesn’t the fact that Muslim terrorists struck at us and killed thousands of our fellow-citizens make a difference. Yes, it makes a difference to me. I agree: in times of crisis there may be a need for extraordinary measures.
Still, I can’t help but wonder what Dershowitz would have said about the use of torture if the accused terrorists were Puerto Rican separatists, supporters of Nelson Mandela during the days of white rule in South Africa, backers of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, 1960s counterculture radicals such as the Weather Underground or peace protestors accused of a bombing at one of our military bases.
I’d bet the ranch that he would be opposed to it. Vehemently opposed. Flamboyantly opposed, on every cable station that would let him into the studio.
