'Torture Them'

Do we want a Vice President who endorses illegal detention and torture of Palestinians? Anthony Cordesman, a national security type frequently deployed as a television pundit, recently posted a paper on the website for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies recommending that Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority engage in just these practices to repress the latest intifada.

"Halt civil violence," Cordesman counsels, "even if it means using excessive force by the standards of Western police forces." But this is only a warm-up. "Halt terrorist and paramilitary action by Hamas and Islamic Jihad," Cordesman continues, "even if this means interrogations, detentions, and trials that are too rapid and lack due process." Still not clear enough. "Effective counter-terrorism relies on interrogation methods that border on psychological and/or physical torture, arrests and detention that violate the normal rights of privacy, [with] levels of violence in making arrests that are unacceptable in civil cases, and measures that involve the innocent (or at least the not provably directly guilty) in arrests and penalties."

In other words, protected only by the weasel phrase "border on," Cordesman urges that Israel's security forces return to the torture techniques that were finally abandoned under High Court order a year ago. Joe Lieberman is one of the senators belonging to the CSIS Middle East Task Force. Thus far, despite explicit requests for comment, he has not disavowed Cordesman's prescriptions, which have been condemned by Amnesty International USA.

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