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06/17/2004: "A new way to spell chutzpah: D-e-r-s-h-o-w-i-t-z water saving "

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has set some kind of new standard for nerve:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., appearing Wednesday with law professors who want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush over the Iraqi prisoner abuse, declined to endorse the idea himself.

Instead, Kennedy opted for a political plug.

The best way to solve things "is to elect John Kerry," said Kennedy, appearing beside two Harvard professors at a news conference upstairs from his Senate office.

The professors presented a letter signed by more than 400 legal scholars urging members of the House and Senate to consider impeaching the president and any high level administration officials who approved the Iraqi prisoner abuses.

Among those signing the letter were former O.J. Simpson defender Alan Dershowitz and the Rev. Robert F. Drinan, a former Massachusetts congressman who teaches at Georgetown University.

This is the same Dershowtiz who was quoted back in May this way:

Dershowitz even defended sexual humiliation as a good way to press Muslim detainees for critical information.

"It‘s a good thing to use women interrogators on radical Muslim extremists," he told MSNBC. "I think it‘s a good thing to make them be stripped naked. I think these are legitimate forms of interrogation in cases where we have high-level prisoners who can provide high-level information."

The top legal thinker recommended that the U.S. should unabashedly tell the world that torturing high value terrorist suspects is justified "because of the war that has been thrust upon us."

"As long as we do it in a way that we can be proud and hold our heads up and say, yes, we did this," he told MSNBC. "But we have to be smart and we have to have accountability."

Dersh's problem is that things weren't done the right way: low-level grunts with inadequate training did it; no court approved it; and–get this–Bush didn't approve it. If Bush had done so, it would have fulfilled one of Dersh's conditions for legally legitimated torture. As it is, he's apparently demanding Bush's impeachment because he wasn't involved enough in the prison scandal.

Incredible.