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Dershowitz closes his article with one of his "it's all about me" remarks, of the kind that were so prevalent in the debate with Sands. He says that he will vote for the Obama-Biden ticket and, so doing, "I will try to persuade them, if they win, not to conduct criminal investigations of their defeated opponents." "I will try to persuade them" (emphasis added) as if they necessarily must be looking for his advice or at least should be looking for it, just as "I consulted with both [Clinton and Libby], without fee, about their cases." [Emphasis added.] There seems no end of ego, does there? And this from a fellow who, brilliant though he is, seems not to care that his position destroys Nuremberg, at least in American courts, destroys the rule of law and accountability, and often relies on mere lawyers' wiles.
One can hardly help suspecting that, for all his bluster at the debate about having been misunderstood, about being against torture, about the justifiability of his ticking time bomb scenario, about this and that, Dershowitz may be deeply concerned over the fact that he is one of those who has received blame for the torture that occurred, and might receive ever more blame in the future as the ideas which motivated people at Guantanamo become ever more known. Could there even be concern over being a possible defendant? That Dershowitz could possibly be a defendant is an idea I would think very unlikely, and positively wrongheaded unless it somehow were to turn out that he did not confine himself to writing and speaking publicly about torture, but instead, like Henry Kissinger secretly sneaking into the White House to advise Bush, had also consulted secretly with the government to urge the permissibility of torture. But as far as I know, there is absolutely no evidence that Dershowitz did this. Naif that I may nonetheless be, I cannot see that Dershowitz (unlike Yoo or Goldsmith) did anything of significance that warrants a fear of prosecution. I thus suspect his concern arises solely from receiving blame for being one possible intellectual godfather of what occurred, however fair or unfair such blame may be.*
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