NYT: Bloggers mock Scooter Libby suckups

[Elfdart]

I don't know about Republitards, but I don't see the legal or ethical value of addressing avoiding larger issue of coercion in interrogation. Forgive me if I don't share your talent for bombast.

Want some cheese to go with your whine?

Finkelstein got what was coming to him. No one should have to abide by unsubstantiated, malicious attacks on their character and professional, not Dershowitz or the researchers working under him.

The lies just get more brazen. Finkelstein's allegations in Beyond Chutzpah are proved beyond any and all reasonable doubt. All he had to do was juxtapose Joan Peter's writings next to the ones plagiarized by Dershowitz. Lazy students who crib their term papers at least try to change enough words to slip by. Dershowitz was so hell bent of plagiarizing (something that gets students expelled) from Joan Peters that he copied her misquotes of Mark Twain and other sources, as well as her botched citations. If he had read the originals, he wouldn't have done that, now would he?

And in the end, not one but two universities absolved Dershowitz: HLS by clearing him of the plagiarism charges and DePaul by denying a this mean-spirited hack tenure.

You mean Derek Bok, Dershowitz's bosom buddy who also "cleared" Laurence Tribe of plagiarism when he was caught red-handed?


Your last lie is a doozy. While the letter from DePaul to Finkelstein is dishonest in its own way, nowhere does it say "By the way, the fact that we won't grant you tenure proves Alan Dershowitz isn't a plagiarist." That lie is all yours. Look on the bright side, unlike your hero's bullshit, yours is at least original.

Are Scooter Libby or Ariel Sharon holding out intelligence of an extremely time sensitive nature? If not, then what evidence do evidence and reason do you have not to take Dershowitz at his word regarding his own thoughts?

Because he's a serial liar.

http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/20 ... ndex3.html

Any reason why you use needles under the fingernails as your torture method of choice?

A reviewer criticized me for that. I purposely wanted to do that. I don't want to be vague. I wanted to come up with a tactic that can't possibly cause permanent physical harm but is excruciatingly painful. I agree with the reviewer; he's right when he said, "different strokes for different folks." For different people, different kinds of nonlethal torture might be more effective. Obviously, to the experts, having seen the movie "Marathon Man," drilling the tooth might be better than some. But the point I wanted to make is that torture is not being used as a way of producing death. It's been used as a way of simply causing excruciating pain.

Aren't there other forms of torture that would be less painful than that, that you might have considered?

But I want more painful. I want maximal pain, minimum lethality. You don't want it to be permanent, you don't want someone to be walking with a limp, but you want to cause the most excruciating, intense, immediate pain. Now, I didn't want to write about testicles, but that's what a lot of people use. I also wanted to be explicit because I didn't want to be squeamish about it. People have asked me whether I would do the torturing and my answer is, yes, I would if I thought it could save a city from being blown up.

But you believe in torture only for the ticking bomb terrorist scenario?

Only for the ticking bomb terrorist -- if the threat is immediate, clear and mega.

And you're advocating that we have warrants for this?

Some accountability. It needn't be a warrant. It can be judicial or legislative. Something that brings it up and makes sure that the American public sees how it works. It's not just done beneath the radar screen.

Your boy doesn't agree with you.

One, a man's celibacy has nothing to do with whether or not he disapproves of those who aren't--that's just stupid.

That's not the point, numbnuts. A man who condones rape or is himself a rapist has no business being called celibate or an advocate for celibacy, since clearly he is not. Dershowitz wants needles jammed under someone's fingernails because of something that only happens in bad movies and moronic TV shows.

And once again, simply because you say the definition of 'civil libertarian' necessarily demands absolute opposition to coercive interrogations under all circumstances doesn't make it true. It makes it personal dicta.

You'll notice in the article linked above, Dershowitz hadn't yet resorted to weasel words to describe torture. He flat-out calls it torture.

Walsingham received his warrants from no independent judiciary, now did he? Where's the due process of law?

Dershowitz doesn't think torturers necessarily need one from an independent judiciary, either -as you can see above

And I'm hoping you didn't mean 'shyster' as an anti-Jewish slur. That's just uncalled for.

The only thing anti-Jewish is your depraved little mind, dipshit. The word shyster means:

Main Entry: shy·ster
Pronunciation: 'shIs-t&r
Function: noun
Etymology: probably from German Scheisser, literally, defecator
: a person who is professionally unscrupulous especially in the practice of law or politics :
PETTIFOGGER

Funny how when someone uses a term for someone who is dishonest, you immediately assume they're talking about Jewish people.

I'm simply pointing out that a man I and my family know and respect is widely considered to be a civil libertarian thanks to an extensive track record of embracing and acting on such issues in law and society.

If you have respect for a torturemonger, liar, plagiarist, and war crime apologist who slimed a Holocaust survivor in an effort to smear her son, then you're just as sick and twisted as he is.

[Elfdart]

Back to the OP, I find it funny that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others so desperately want a Get Out Of Jail Free Card for Libby. It's only natural they would. If Libby ends up in the jug, it's an obvious precedent for putting some of them behind bars, too.

[metavac]

Want some cheese to go with your whine?

Want a bullhorn to go with your bullshit?

The lies just get more brazen. Finkelstein's allegations in Beyond Chutzpah are proved beyond any and all reasonable doubt.

Oh really? Here we have all of Finkelstein's alleged incidents of plagiarism. Identify one that qualifies.

All he had to do was juxtapose Joan Peter's writings next to the ones plagiarized by Dershowitz.

Show me a single piece of Joan Peter's original writing that ended up in The Case for Israel. Just one. Otherwise, you're either lying about your familiarity with this case or simply lying about the facts.

Lazy students who crib their term papers at least try to change enough words to slip by. Dershowitz was so hell bent of plagiarizing (something that gets students expelled) from Joan Peters that he copied her misquotes of Mark Twain and other sources, as well as her botched citations. If he had read the originals, he wouldn't have done that, now would he?

Name one part of the Mark Twain passage that's misquoted. Here's a link to Innocents Abroad.

You mean Derek Bok, Dershowitz's bosom buddy who also "cleared" Laurence Tribe of plagiarism when he was caught red-handed?

Bok cleared Tribe of intentionally plagiarizing Henry Abraham's work, allegations which amounted to about five small passages in a 171 page book. Tribe was not cleared of plagiarism and he publicly acknowledged and apologized for his error.

Your last lie is a doozy. While the letter from DePaul to Finkelstein is dishonest in its own way, nowhere does it say "By the way, the fact that we won't grant you tenure proves Alan Dershowitz isn't a plagiarist." That lie is all yours. Look on the bright side, unlike your hero's bullshit, yours is at least original.

Finkelstein defamed the scholarship of Dershowitz work, and the only evidence he provided were a handful of shared quotes. And you yourself admitted that Dershowitz successfully campaigned to have his tenure denied. If you don't accept the judgment of Finkelstein's peers, that's your look out. But it does make your claim extraordinary (though not unexpected, given your malicious bent).

Because he's a serial liar.

Exactly what about his qualification on warrants indicates that he's a liar?

Your boy doesn't agree with you.

Point out one remark I made that even comes close to saying I agreed with Dershowitz, moron.

That's not the point, numbnuts.

It is a point when you fucking raise it, dumbass.

A man who condones rape or is himself a rapist has no business being called celibate or an advocate for celibacy, since clearly he is not.

Are you fucking stupid? How does another's abstinence or lack thereof determine where or not someone is celibate? And while we're on it, are Catholic no advocates for celibacy simply because they don't require non-clergy to take their vows? Don't be a fucking idiot.

Dershowitz wants needles jammed under someone's fingernails because of something that only happens in bad movies and moronic TV shows.

I haven't taken issue with this characterization of the ticking time bomb scenario and I'm not about to start now.

You'll notice in the article linked above, Dershowitz hadn't yet resorted to weasel words to describe torture. He flat-out calls it torture.

Like I said, I don't necessarily agree with Dershowitz.

Dershowitz doesn't think torturers necessarily need one from an independent judiciary, either -as you can see above

Yet he requires the process require legislative or judicial approval, moron. The point is that an branch of government other than the Executive is overseeing it. And in the end, none of the information can be used in prosecution--that's where due process comes in.

The only thing anti-Jewish is your depraved little mind, dipshit.

You little racist fuck. Shyster's etymology lies with shylock, which as you well know is a Shakespearean source for a pernicious anti-Semitic stereotype. You're too stupid to play dumb, so don't try, kid.

Funny how when someone uses a term for someone who is dishonest, you immediately assume they're talking about Jewish people.

Oh, and you just so happen to use a term maliciously that just so happens to be an ethnic slur against a Jewish attorney?

If you have respect for a torturemonger, liar, plagiarist, and war crime apologist who slimed a Holocaust survivor in an effort to smear her son, then you're just as sick and twisted as he is.

Since Dershowitz is none of those (especially since the last one is Dershowitz pursuing a line of thought opened by Finkelstein himself), what's your point? The man is a third rate political theorist teaching in a second rate department. He swung first and Dershowitz hit him back with his own words. Where's the beef?

[Elfdart]

The lies just get more brazen. Finkelstein's allegations in Beyond Chutzpah are proved beyond any and all reasonable doubt.

Oh really? Here we have all of Finkelstein's alleged incidents of plagiarism. Identify one that qualifies.

All of them.

Show me a single piece of Joan Peter's original writing that ended up in The Case for Israel. Just one. Otherwise, you're either lying about your familiarity with this case or simply lying about the facts.

Her endnotes. Dershowitz claims that he wrote The Case For Israel, yet his endnotes match hers, including her misquoting (and selective editing) of Twain's The Innocents Abroad. Peters' technique is to take bits of one paragraph on one page, then splice them together with selective quotes from other pages, in much the same way that kidnappers in movies cut the letters out of different newspapers and magazines to make their ransom letters. The difference is, movie villains use paste to put their "Pay Up Or Else!" letters together, while Peters uses ellipses. It's these ellipses that give Dershowitz away, because while he claims to have checked out Peters' sources, his endnotes are almost identical. He copies her mistakes, misquotes and other bullfuckery.

For example, when Peters turned bits and pieces of Twain's book into this hostage letter:

Mark Twain […] visited the Holy Land in 1867. in one location after another, Twain registered gloom at his findings: "stirring scenes . . . occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent - not for thirty miles in either direction. there are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. one may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. […] come to galilee for that . . . these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal palms. . . . We reached Tabor safely. . . .We never saw a human being on the whole route. Nazareth is forlorn. . . . Jericho the accursed lies in a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliations, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Savior's presence, the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang, `peace on earth, good will to men,' is untenanted by any living creature. . . . Bethsaida and Chorzin have vanished from the earth, and the `desert places' round about them, where thousands of men once listened to the Savior's voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes." (pp. 159-60)

source cited: mark twain, the innocents abroad (london: 1881), pp. 349, 366, 375, 441-442.

Dershowitz cribbed this to the the point where he put the ellipses in the same places! But here's the real smoking gun:

The parts I highlighted in red are found on page 520 of the 1881 edition of Twain's book (Finkelstein shows photocopies of the actual pages of the three books in question in Beyond Chutzpah, so no one can bullshit their way out of it) . The part in green is from page 607 of the book, yet both Peters and Dershowitz just happen to splice together the exact same quotes in the exact same way -quotes that are written eighty-seven pages apart in the original?

By the way, both Peters and Dershowitz attribute part of this chop-job to page 349 of Twain's book, yet none of the cut-and-pasted quotes is found on page 349. Peters fucks up a page citation and Dershowitz makes the exact same mistake twenty years later on his own? Please.

I'm not going to reproduce all of the other ones here (this has taken up enough space), but this one shows Peters' M.O. perfectly. It also shows Dershowitz is a plagiarist, and that you are a lying fucktard.

Name one part of the Mark Twain passage that's misquoted. Here's a link to Innocents Abroad.

See above.

Bok cleared Tribe of intentionally plagiarizing Henry Abraham's work, allegations which amounted to about five small passages in a 171 page book. Tribe was not cleared of plagiarism and he publicly acknowledged and apologized for his error.

It doesn't matter if plagiarism is intentional or not.

Finkelstein defamed the scholarship of Dershowitz work,

What scholarship? Not only did he rip off someone else's book, the book he plagiarized was arguably the most clownish hoax since Chariots of the Gods.

and the only evidence he provided were a handful of shared quotes.

Twenty cases of trying to pass off someone else's work as his own -something that at the very least gets students a failing grade and in many cases, gets them expelled.

And you yourself admitted that Dershowitz successfully campaigned to have his tenure denied.

That's an accomplishment of a sort, but nothing to brag about. A Moonie hack writer named Joel Mowbray was successful in smearing Juan Cole out of a job at Princeton. Sliming someone with an unpopular opinion isn't exactly herculean.

If you don't accept the judgment of Finkelstein's peers, that's your look out.

Finkelstein's peers are people like Raul Hilberg, Avi Shlaim, Baruch Kimmerling and Sara Roy: real scholars -as well as the members of the faculty who voted overwhelmingly for tenure. Political hacks and cowardly administrators don't count as peers

Exactly what about his qualification on warrants indicates that he's a liar?

It's not just that. Nice try at twisting my words, though.

It is a point when you fucking raise it, dumbass.

No wonder you're such a fanwhore for Dershowitz. My point, which you got, but choose to lie about anyway, is that someone doesn't deserve to be recognized for something he or she she clearly is not. It's worse still when someone is the exact opposite of what people make them out to be. Someone who condones shoving needles under a person's fingernails to torture information out of them is not a civil libertarian.

Dershowitz doesn't think torturers necessarily need one from an independent judiciary, either -as you can see above

Yet he requires the process require legislative or judicial approval, moron.

That makes a difference how, exactly?

The point is that an branch of government other than the Executive is overseeing it.

I'm sure it makes a difference to a guy getting a glowstick rammed up his ass whether the order to have him "put to the question" came from a judge, congressman, cop, soldier, president or dogcatcher.

And in the end, none of the information can be used in prosecution--that's where due process comes in.

That makes it so much better.

You little racist fuck. Shyster's etymology lies with shylock, which as you well know is a Shakespearean source for a pernicious anti-Semitic stereotype. You're too stupid to play dumb, so don't try, kid.

At this point, I'd like a mod to follow this lying cocksucker's link. Remember, metavac claims that this source shows that the word shyster comes from Shylock, a character in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and that because the word is based on Shylock, that I'm a "little racist fuck". Which is kind of funny, since the lying asshole's link shows quite the opposite:

The term does not come from -as suggested in various dictionaries- the surname Scheuster, supposedly a lawyer noted for shyster-like practices; from the name of the Shakespearian character, Shylock; ... or from the various meanings of the word shy (e.g. to be shy of money). Rather... shyster evolved from the underworld use of shiser, a worthless fellow, which derived in turn from the German scheisse, excrement, via scheisser and incompetent person (specifically, one who cannot control his bodily functions)...

Hugh Dawson (1991)
A Dictionary of Invective

I think you owe me an apology.

Since Dershowitz is none of those (especially since the last one is Dershowitz pursuing a line of thought opened by Finkelstein himself), what's your point?

Another lie. Norman Finkelstein's mother was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Majdinek (a Nazi concentration camp), who testified at a U.S. deportation hearing for a Nazi camp guard and at a war crimes trial in Germany (both in the 1970s). Norman Finkelstein relates that as a kid, his parents (his father was also a survivor of the Final Solution) almost never talked about their experiences. When he was older, he once asked his mother if she ever did anything during the war she wasn't proud of. She said an emphatic "No" and that was the end of it. Dershowitz took that and twisted it to mean that Finkelstein called his own mother a Nazi collaborator. This alone makes Alan Dershowitz a worthless piece of shit.

The man is a third rate political theorist teaching in a second rate department.

And yet it took a huge smear campaign including Dershowitz, FOX News and FrontPage, David Horowitz's website that publishes the ravings of Holocaust deniers to slime Finkelstein and cost him a job.

He swung first and Dershowitz hit him back with his own words. Where's the beef?

Truman used to warn his enemies that if they didn't stop lying about him, he'd have to tell the truth about them. This is the flip side. Finkelstein told the truth: Alan Dershowitz is a serial liar, plagiarist and apologist for war crimes. Since the truth hurts, and Dershowitz has no use for the truth anyway, he responded with campaign of the most repulsive lies ever used to smear a man. The only thing Dershowitz proved is that libel law in this country is a dead letter. The only thing you have shown is that you are also a serial liar.

Fuck off, scumbag.

[VT-16]

the ticking time bomb scenario

Adding to what others have already used as refutation to this method, if there's a time bomb about to go off, what's stopping the detainee from just giving a bogus, faraway location?

[Pu-239]

Well, instead of the ticking time bomb scenario, what about torture to retrieve instantly verifiable information, such as encryption keys?

[metavac]

All of them.

You can't even identify one.

Her endnotes. Dershowitz claims that he wrote The Case For Israel, yet his endnotes match hers, including her misquoting (and selective editing) of Twain's The Innocents Abroad.

22 of 52 endnotes in the first two chapters are shared. So what? We already have documentation to that effect: "I included an instruction to my research assistant to cite several sources I came upon in Joan Peters's book. I also instructed my research staff to check these sources against the original."

And at no point does Finkelstein offer any evidence that any of Peter's words were lifted. Where is the plagiarism? Are you seriously going to argue that Peter's has exclusive license to Mark Twain?

Peters' technique is to take bits of one paragraph on one page, then splice them together with selective quotes from other pages, in much the same way that kidnappers in movies cut the letters out of different newspapers and magazines to make their ransom letters.

Except movie villians pick random letters from various different pieces by different authors. Are you suggesting Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad was written by multiple authors at different times for different reasons? Or is Mark Twain just a schizophrenic?

The difference is, movie villains use paste to put their "Pay Up Or Else!" letters together, while Peters uses ellipses. It's these ellipses that give Dershowitz away, because while he claims to have checked out Peters' sources, his endnotes are almost identical. He copies her mistakes, misquotes and other bullfuckery.

Where is it misquoted? I've checked it against the original and can't find the misquote. We have obviously Dershowitz reproducing Peter's miscite, probably because the quoted passage was lifted from Peter's book rather than from Innocents Abroad. So fucking what? We already have him on record saying as much. None of Peter's language is used; every thing there belongs to Mark Twain.

For example, when Peters turned bits and pieces of Twain's book into this hostage letter:

Mark Twain […] visited the Holy Land in 1867. in one location after another, Twain registered gloom at his findings: "stirring scenes . . . occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent - not for thirty miles in either direction. there are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. one may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. […] come to galilee for that . . . these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal palms. . . . We reached Tabor safely. . . .We never saw a human being on the whole route. Nazareth is forlorn. . . . Jericho the accursed lies in a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliations, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Savior's presence, the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang, `peace on earth, good will to men,' is untenanted by any living creature. . . . Bethsaida and Chorzin have vanished from the earth, and the `desert places' round about them, where thousands of men once listened to the Savior's voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes." (pp. 159-60)

source cited: mark twain, the innocents abroad (london: 1881), pp. 349, 366, 375, 441-442.

Dershowitz cribbed this to the the point where he put the ellipses in the same places! But here's the real smoking gun:

The parts I highlighted in red are found on page 520 of the 1881 edition of Twain's book (Finkelstein shows photocopies of the actual pages of the three books in question in Beyond Chutzpah, so no one can bullshit their way out of it) . The part in green is from page 607 of the book, yet both Peters and Dershowitz just happen to splice together the exact same quotes in the exact same way -quotes that are written eighty-seven pages apart in the original? By the way, both Peters and Dershowitz attribute part of this chop-job to page 349 of Twain's book, yet none of the cut-and-pasted quotes is found on page 349. Peters fucks up a page citation and Dershowitz makes the exact same mistake twenty years later on his own? Please.

You can actually do this work yourself. Why you would, I don't understand. Every single one of those alleged acts of plagiarism involve cited material in both books. Not one is an example of Dershowitz lifting Peter's original words. So all this elaborate hand-waving you and Finkelstein perform is to what end? To show a scholar lifted a properly quoted but miscited passage from another source? Who gives a damn? That's not plagiarism, and it wasn't found to be by Derek Bok's investigation or the subsequent Larry Summers review.

I'm not going to reproduce all of the other ones here (this has taken up enough space), but this one shows Peters' M.O. perfectly. It also shows Dershowitz is a plagiarist, and that you are a lying fucktard.

You're not going to reproduce any because you're a hateful and racist lying piece of shit and you have none to offer.

See above.

You've shown me a miscite. Where's the misquote?

It doesn't matter if plagiarism is intentional or not.

The hell it doesn't, but that's not the issue. You said that Tribe was cleared of plagiarism. He wasn't, dumbass.

What scholarship? Not only did he rip off someone else's book, the book he plagiarized was arguably the most clownish hoax since Chariots of the Gods.

You know as well as I do there's a moratorium on IvP, and we're not going to get into this discussion without touching on the substance.

Twenty cases of trying to pass off someone else's work as his own -something that at the very least gets students a failing grade and in many cases, gets them expelled.

Except Dershowitz didn't. He used and cited Mark Twain and other authors, some miscited but all in fact cited. Name one student who's ever been expelled or failed for doing what Dershowitz did. Name one professor who has.

That's an accomplishment of a sort, but nothing to brag about.

Sure it is. Finkelstein's a defaming hack and got what he deserved.

A Moonie hack writer named Joel Mowbray was successful in smearing Juan Cole out of a job at Princeton. Sliming someone with an unpopular opinion isn't exactly herculean.

I don't know the circumstances of Juan Cole's departure from Princeton, and I'm not going to follow you into a tangent about how you feel your academic idols are getting a bum rap. Stick to the case at hand or find yourself a violin and somebody who cares.

Finkelstein's peers are people like Raul Hilberg, Avi Shlaim, Baruch Kimmerling and Sara Roy: real scholars -as well as the members of the faculty who voted overwhelmingly for tenure. Political hacks and cowardly administrators don't count as peers

Regardless of your estimation of them, none of them are DePaul faculty. And despite Finkelstein's attempts to rally his contingent of hacks amongst the students and faculties, in the end UBPT and the provost recommended he not receive tenure. That's that.

It's not just that. Nice try at twisting my words, though.

Then what is it? And answer the question, dumbass. What about his qualification on warrants casts him as a liar?

No wonder you're such a fanwhore for Dershowitz. My point, which you got, but choose to lie about anyway, is that someone doesn't deserve to be recognized for something he or she she clearly is not. It's worse still when someone is the exact opposite of what people make them out to be. Someone who condones shoving needles under a person's fingernails to torture information out of them is not a civil libertarian.

And you're back to this dicta. If that's your view, that's your look out. But it's dicta nonetheless. It's as if you've personally appointed yourself the final authority on who is or isn't a civil libertarian, and quite frankly "because I say it is" doesn't amount to a useful definition of any term of art. I can understand why, you're as predictable a fanwhore for any critic of Israel as you could find on talk.politics.mideast (is the fact that Finkelstein's a Jew a double treat for you?). That this "shyster" Dershowitz shoved your boy's attempts to malign him right up his untenured ass must irritate you to no end.

That makes a difference how, exactly?

The whole focus of civil liberties is improving on the protection of the individual from the state. Are you seriously arguing that requiring due process amounts to no improvement at all? Police brutality happens, does that mean that people who focus on evidentiary abuse arising from such brutality are somehow not engaged in work on civil liberties?

I'm sure it makes a difference to a guy getting a glowstick rammed up his ass whether the order to have him "put to the question" came from a judge, congressman, cop, soldier, president or dogcatcher.

It does if he knows he can't be prosecuted for what he gives up. And are you going to really ignore what the political circumstances in which this debate is taking place? As far as Dershowitz is concerned, Americans are entirely too comfortable with coercive interrogation and that such dismissal licenses the government to engage in it with little restriction. There is no political cache to speak of that can even think succeeding in a complete ban. He seeks to change that by "expressly limiting the use of torture only to the ticking bomb case and by requiring a highly visible judge to approve, limit and monitor the torture, it will be far more difficult to justify its extension to other institutions."

That makes it so much better.

You fucking idiot. What happens if the Supreme Court upholds MCA? Where do you think the center of the debate will be after that?

I think you owe me an apology.

I do owe an apology. I didn't read the source carefully and I've got on egg on my face for it. Nevertheless, that doesn't absolve from using a word maliciously that his been, even falsely, so commonly viewed as an eponym of two anti-Semitic stereotypes that it's become a slur in the modern day. You remain a Jew-hating fuck.

Another lie. Norman Finkelstein's mother was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Majdinek (a Nazi concentration camp), who testified at a U.S. deportation hearing for a Nazi camp guard and at a war crimes trial in Germany (both in the 1970s). Norman Finkelstein relates that as a kid, his parents (his father was also a survivor of the Final Solution) almost never talked about their experiences. When he was older, he once asked his mother if she ever did anything during the war she wasn't proud of. She said an emphatic "No" and that was the end of it. Dershowitz took that and twisted it to mean that Finkelstein called his own mother a Nazi collaborator. This alone makes Alan Dershowitz a worthless piece of shit.

Finkelstein did question whether his mother collaborated. He went to great length to set up the notion that she turned down one job offer and then closed with his incredulity that she survived. Whether or not his mother actually was a collaborator, and Dershowitz never says she was, is a non-issue. The issue is that Finkelstein is such a fucking shlemiel he feels the need to entertain such thoughts about his own mother.

And yet it took a huge smear campaign including Dershowitz, FOX News and FrontPage, David Horowitz's website that publishes the ravings of Holocaust deniers to slime Finkelstein and cost him a job.

Huge smear campaign? It actually took a letter from the University President, seven faculty and provost to find that Finkelstein's entire career--like you're sole purpose in life--is to engage in personal attacks against his betters.

Truman used to warn his enemies that if they didn't stop lying about him, he'd have to tell the truth about them. This is the flip side. Finkelstein told the truth: Alan Dershowitz is a serial liar, plagiarist and apologist for war crimes. Since the truth hurts, and Dershowitz has no use for the truth anyway, he responded with campaign of the most repulsive lies ever used to smear a man. The only thing Dershowitz proved is that libel law in this country is a dead letter. The only thing you have shown is that you are also a serial liar.

Stop sulking man and face the music. Your boy got burned because he's as shitty a scholar you are, as mean-spirited as you are, and as out of his league as you are. If you have to lie to yourself to get throughout, be my guest. Just suck it up when somebody calls you on your bullshit.

Fuck off, scumbag.

Gladly, I don't have patience for anti-Semites.

[Keevan_Colton]

Quit the anti-semite bullshit or you're getting HOS'ed Metavac.

[Vympel]

I was about to say the same thing. It takes a special amount of gall to claim that Elfdart used the word "shyster" as some sort of racial slur, despite the word's actual meaning and origins, and even when faced with this fact, go on to assert that he meant it in the made-up, racist sense nonetheless.

[metavac]

After going through the history of Elfdart's posts related to the question of Jews, I'm convinced I was in error to call him an anti-Semite. He has consistently taken issue with defenses of Holocaust deniers, he's been utterly reasonable and measured in his criticisms of Israel, particularly as it pertains to Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry I retract my remarks on those lines and apologize.

[momochan]

Back to the OP, I find it funny that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others so desperately want a Get Out Of Jail Free Card for Libby. It's only natural they would. If Libby ends up in the jug, it's an obvious precedent for putting some of them behind bars, too.

You know if it were a liberal who leaked a CIA operative's name, these guys would decry the liberal as an amalgamation of Al Qaeda and the KGB. Trying to defend Scooter is jaw-droppingly brazen.

Speaking of, does anyone know of any prominent liberals who are writing letters on behalf of William Jefferson, who is currently facing corruption charges?

[Elfdart]

The law against outing agents was a reaction against Philip Agee, a disgruntled ex-CIA agent who blew the whistle on some of the more outrageous crimes the agency committed.

[Darth Wong]

After going through the history of Elfdart's posts related to the question of Jews, I'm convinced I was in error to call him an anti-Semite. He has consistently taken issue with defenses of Holocaust deniers, he's been utterly reasonable and measured in his criticisms of Israel, particularly as it pertains to Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry I retract my remarks on those lines and apologize.

Are you saying that the instant he used the word "shyster", he was guilty until proven innocent? And that he's off the hook now because you've inspected his posting history and decided that there's enough evidence to find him innocent? What if he had no posting history? Would you stand by your idiotic "you said shyster, therefore you're a Jew-hating Nazi" nonsense in that case?

[Keevan_Colton]

Main Entry: shy·ster
Pronunciation: 'shIs-t&r
Function: noun
Etymology: probably from German Scheisser, literally, defecator
: a person who is professionally unscrupulous especially in the practice of law or politics :

[metavac]

Are you saying that the instant he used the word "shyster", he was guilty until proven innocent? And that he's off the hook now because you've inspected his posting history and decided that there's enough evidence to find him innocent? What if he had no posting history? Would you stand by your idiotic "you said shyster, therefore you're a Jew-hating Nazi" nonsense in that case?

Where I come from, "shyster" and "shylock" are right up there with "kike," especially when used in a discussion not only about a Jewish lawyer but one who's expressed strong support for Israel. Take that as you will. In a rush to judgment, I even mischaracterized evidence I alleged showed an etymological connection between the term and one with a clearly anti-Semitic history. For that, I apologized.

[Elfdart]

Her endnotes. Dershowitz claims that he wrote The Case For Israel, yet his endnotes match hers, including her misquoting (and selective editing) of Twain's The Innocents Abroad.

22 of 52 endnotes in the first two chapters are shared. So what? We already have documentation to that effect: "I included an instruction to my research assistant to cite several sources I came upon in Joan Peters's book. I also instructed my research staff to check these sources against the original."

And at no point does Finkelstein offer any evidence that any of Peter's words were lifted. Where is the plagiarism? Are you seriously going to argue that Peter's has exclusive license to Mark Twain?

Peters' cut-and-paste job may use fragments of Twain's works, but the arrangement, which Dershowitz plagiarized two decades later, is all her own.

Plagiarism

All of the following are considered plagiarism:

* turning in someone else's work as your own
* copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
* failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
* giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
* changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
* copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not (see our section on "fair use" rules)

[boldface mine]

If the shoe fits, wear it.

Except movie villians pick random letters from various different pieces by different authors. Are you suggesting Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad was written by multiple authors at different times for different reasons? Or is Mark Twain just a schizophrenic?

Throwing around one red herring after another, I see.

Where is it misquoted? I've checked it against the original and can't find the misquote. We have obviously Dershowitz reproducing Peter's miscite, probably because the quoted passage was lifted from Peter's book rather than from Innocents Abroad. So fucking what? We already have him on record saying as much. None of Peter's language is used; every thing there belongs to Mark Twain.

When you chop up and rearrange someone else's writings, you are misquoting them, especially when you do it to change the meaning of what they've written. Twain is describing an uneventful trip in what is now Israel and Palestine. Peters cut-and-pasted Twain to make his travel diary mesh with her crackpot thesis: The Palestinians never really existed, so there was no ethnic cleansing (to use a modern term) in 1948. Dershowitz plagiarized Peters' misquoting of Twain, then cites as his source, not the 1881 edition (which Peters butchered), but the 1996 edition. There's a problem. The arrangement of those words I highlighted earlier, in that particular sequence (taking quotes that appear 87 pages apart and getting the page numbers wrong) appears in one place and one place only: Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial.

Regardless of your estimation of them, none of them are DePaul faculty. And despite Finkelstein's attempts to rally his contingent of hacks amongst the students and faculties, in the end UBPT and the provost recommended he not receive tenure. That's that.

The Political Science department (i.e. the faculty) voted overwhelmingly in Finkelstein's favor.

Then what is it? And answer the question, dumbass. What about his qualification on warrants casts him as a liar?

From Dershowitz's letter to American Conservative:

Had he read my book, Why Terrorism Works, instead of relying on Finkelstein's mischaracterization of my position, Desch would know that I am a stalwart opponent of torture, that I have fought hard against torture in both America and Israel, and that my proposals are designed to minimize and hopefully prevent torture.

Now take a look at the quote from Salon in my earlier post. He claims to be against torture ( a "stalwart opponent of torture"), but wants needles rammed under fingernails.

The whole focus of civil liberties is improving on the protection of the individual from the state. Are you seriously arguing that requiring due process amounts to no improvement at all?

An order to torture someone (a violation of the U.S. Constitution, by the way) being issued by a court or legislator counts as due process?

Police brutality happens, does that mean that people who focus on evidentiary abuse arising from such brutality are somehow not engaged in work on civil liberties?

The fact that someone might support civil rights in one area does not cancel his or her flagrant contempt for civil rights in other areas. A Republitard Congressman who voted to legalize torture last year can't truthfully claim to be a civil libertarian just because he opposed the eminent domain decision the Supreme Court made a while back. A broken watch may be right twice a day, but it's still not an accurate timepiece.

I'm sure it makes a difference to a guy getting a glowstick rammed up his ass whether the order to have him "put to the question" came from a judge, congressman, cop, soldier, president or dogcatcher.

It does if he knows he can't be prosecuted for what he gives up.

Someone being tortured is going to be concerned about the exclusionary rule and his possible day in court? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.

And are you going to really ignore what the political circumstances in which this debate is taking place? As far as Dershowitz is concerned, Americans are entirely too comfortable with coercive interrogation

More shyster language. It's called torture, and one reason so many Americans support it is because numerous public figures (including a Harvard law professor I could name) extoll its virtues.

and that such dismissal licenses the government to engage in it with little restriction.

Uh-huh. The third amendment to the Constitution forbids the government from quartering troops in civilian homes during peacetime without the homeowners' permission. Does that blanket prohibition encourage the Army to billet soldiers in private homes? What encourages the state to violate fundamental rights is a desire for power and other base motives. As Orwell pointed out, the purpose of torture is torture itself.

There is no political cache to speak of that can even think succeeding in a complete ban.

No shit, Sherlock. Of course there's no "political cache to speak of " that will ever stop all rapists, armed robbers, child molesters and serial killers. Legalizing violent crimes as long as the victims fit a certain description will encourage more of the same, not discourage it.

He seeks to change that by "expressly limiting the use of torture only to the ticking bomb case and by requiring a highly visible judge to approve, limit and monitor the torture, it will be far more difficult to justify its extension to other institutions."

Tell that to the 30-40% of US troops in Iraq who admit to being in favor of torture. The UCMJ expressly forbids ANY mistreatment of prisoners, let alone torture. Ever wonder where those troops got the idea that it's OK? I'll give you a hint: It's all the public figures (government officials, media figures and at least one sadistic law professor) who keep claiming that torture is a good and necessary thing based on a scenario that only exists in bad movies and terrible TV shows.

You fucking idiot. What happens if the Supreme Court upholds MCA? Where do you think the center of the debate will be after that?

The War Crimes Act of 1996 allows the death penalty for anyone who tortures a prisoner to death, or even kills a prisoner while mistreating him in other ways. Before that law was mostly nullified last year by the MCA (remember, those who torture are subject to prison and possibly execution), was the Bush Junta deterred from torturing people? MCA is more of a "Get Out of Jail Free" card than a license to torture, which the sadistic fucktards in the Junta claim to have had from the beginning.

Finkelstein did question whether his mother collaborated.

He asked if she did anything in the war she wasn't proud of. The question arose when she remarked that the refined, polite people tended not to survive. He then remarked about how manners weren't her strong suit, the way she would always push to the front of the line and figured she wasn't a shrinking violet when, I would guess, food was handed out to prisoners.

He went to great length to set up the notion that she turned down one job offer and then closed with his incredulity that she survived. Whether or not his mother actually was a collaborator, and Dershowitz never says she was, is a non-issue. The issue is that Finkelstein is such a fucking shlemiel he feels the need to entertain such thoughts about his own mother.

By your dishonest "logic", the stories about American POWs in the Pacific who many years later and out of habit, would crawl on the ground for the rice thrown at weddings means they were Japanese collaborators. And if their kids or grandkids asked how they survived Bataan, they were calling grandpa a traitor. Yeah, right.

Huge smear campaign?

I'd say Harvard ( the lies about Finkelstein's mother were put up on the University's website), FOX News, the ADL and numerous other outlets would make up a rather large one.

It actually took a letter from the University President, seven faculty and provost to find that Finkelstein's entire career--like you're sole purpose in life--is to engage in personal attacks against his betters.

And yet the letter doesn't offer a single example.

In any event, I don't see how a serial liar, torture enthusiast, war crimes apologist and plagiarist whose main media outlets are Penthouse, a bankrupt porno magazine featuring pictures of women urinating, and FrontPage, a website best known for crude race-baiting and printing columns by a known Holocaust denier, can be counted among anyone's "betters", and that includes his scummy clients like O.J. Simpson.

As for personal attacks, I don't know of anyone sliming Dershowitz's mother. In fact, every attack from Finkelstein has been on D's public writings and misdeeds. The fact that Dershowitz and his dishonest fanwhores (like yourself) have to lie so brazenly and so often to defend him shows that you have no argument. The fact that you saw fit to call me an anti-Semite shows that you are a worthless piece of shit.

In other words, concession accepted.

[Darth Wong]

Are you saying that the instant he used the word "shyster", he was guilty until proven innocent? And that he's off the hook now because you've inspected his posting history and decided that there's enough evidence to find him innocent? What if he had no posting history? Would you stand by your idiotic "you said shyster, therefore you're a Jew-hating Nazi" nonsense in that case?

Where I come from, "shyster" and "shylock" are right up there with "kike," especially when used in a discussion not only about a Jewish lawyer but one who's expressed strong support for Israel. Take that as you will.

I will take that as proof that in your area, a word for dishonest businessmen is considered synonymous with "jew", which is a severe indictment of your area.