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A law professor to be ignored - yet again!

I have in the past deplored the writings of Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard. Some one say Dershowitz is something of a media tart. Whatever, his repetition of his previous call thaat torture is ok when dealing with terrorists is obscene - and a questionable premise especially coming from a lawyer.

As The Indpendent reports Dershwowitz saying:

"The problem is that the current laws regulating the detention of combatants are near useless when it comes to this motley array of detainees. These detainees simply do not fit into the old, anachronistic categories. Most are not classic prisoners of war. They were not part of a uniformed army under the command of a nation. But neither do they fit in to the classic definition of "unlawful combatants". They are not spies or saboteurs, as those terms have been understood in the context of conventional warfare. Nor are many of them simple "criminals", subject to ordinary trials under the domestic law of crimes. They comprise a new category - or set of categories - unto themselves. They cannot be held as POWs until the end of the war, because this is a war that will never end. They cannot simply be released, because many of them would quickly volunteer to engage in suicide terrorist missions against their former captors, as some already have done. Most cannot be tried as criminals, because their actions took place outside the jurisdiction of the detaining nation. Those who have valuable, real-time information will be interrogated, and - short of the absolute law against "torture" - there are few, if any, rules governing the nature of permissible interrogation when the object is not to elicit "incrimination confessions" for purposes of criminal prosecution, but rather to obtain "preventive intelligence" for the purpose of pre-empting future terrorist attacks."

Read Dershowitzs' position, in the complete piece, here. This man's views are dangerous and caste aside the basic rules of law. Ignore him! Needless to say Dershowitz is critical of human-rights oprganisations like Amnesty International. Some lawyer!

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