Bill Clinton on "Torture"

This is very interesting for a couple of reasons. Most of all, for how little attention the comments received.

From a NY Sun article by Alan Dershowitz titled "Clinton and I":

Mr. Clinton was asked, as someone "who's been there," whether the president needs "the option of authorizing torture in an extreme case."

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.

This is basically what I wrote here on Sept 17th. In just about every respect.

I'm not trying to toot my horn. I'm trying to highlight two things: 1) the validity of my idea 2) the potential for agreement between two people of different political underpinings on important issues.