Doug Ross @ Journal

The Five D's of Dodgeball

I saw the movie Dodgeball again last night. When dodgeball legend Patches O'Houlihan taught his young charges the five D's of dodgeball ("Dodge, duck, dip, dive and... dodge"), it reminded me of nothing less than the Gonzales hearing. How? When the question arose of whether the use of torture would ever be justified, the Left dodged, ducked, dipped, dived... and dodged again.

These are the hard thinkers, the academics, the intellectual leaders of the Left. And they can't answer the question. The following transcript tells the story.

SPECTER: And now with three individuals who are more, perhaps, academicians or at least in part academicians, we could explore a subject which we have not taken up, a delicate subject, and that is the issue of the so-called ticking bomb case on torture. There are some prominent authorities -- and I do not subscribe to this view but only set it forth for purposes of discussion -- that if it was known, probable cause, that an individual had a ticking bomb and was about to blow up hundreds of thousands of people in a major American city, that consideration might be given to torture. ...Dean Koh, start with you. Are considerations for those tactics ever justifiable, even in the face of a ticking-bomb threat? KOH: Well, senator, you're a former prosecutor, and I think that my approach would be to keep the flat ban, and if someone -- the president of time of the United States -- had to make a decision like that, someone would have to decide whether to prosecute him or not. But I don't think that the answer is to create an exception in the law, because an exception becomes a loophole, and a loophole starts to water down the prohibition. I think what we saw at Abu Ghraib is the reality of torture.

Hmmm... peel the veneer of academia away, present the tough questions of the real world, and what do we get? Nothing. He can't answer the question. And Abu Graib is related to this question... how?

Here's Admiral Hutson, the judge advocate general during the Clinton administration.

SPECTER: Dean Hutson, what do you think? Ever an occasion to even consider that? HUTSON: I agree with, uh, with Dean Koh that it is always illegal. Now, you may decide that you are going to take the illegal action, ummm, because you have to.

So Hutson agrees with a non-answer. Let's see what Douglas Johnson, director of the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, has to say.

JOHNSON: On the specifics of the -- of the ticking time bomb, I think that it's very overblown in our imaginations, and -- and it's very ripe with what I would...could only call fantasy and mythology.

Quite telling. The Academicians of the Left can't answer that single, simple and eminently important question.