Hitting Hillary Over Torture, Will Brooks Bash Bill Too?

October 20th, 2006 9:31 AM

Despite the harsh headline: Hillary Hits Bottom, Hillary Clinton might actually welcome Rosa Brooks' LA Times column of this morning condemning her for supporting legislation allowing torture in ticking-bomb cases.  Call it a 'Sistah Rosa' moment that Hillary can point to as proof she's not too soft on terror to be president.

But I wonder.  Is Brooks aware - while bashing the presumptive presidential candidate for supporting legislation permitting torture in narrowly delineated cases - that Hillary is echoing her husband?

Has Brooks read this column by Alan Dershowitz?  The Harvard law prof reports on Bill's recent NPR interview in which he said:

"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. . . you do it on a case-by-case basis, and there'd be some review of it."

So how about it, Ms. Brooks?  Has Bill "hit bottom" too? You said Hillary has "fallen as low as it's possible to go." Is the same so of the Dem American Idol?