Hi Dahlia,

I see that you have taken the bait of the publisher of "Law and The Long War", and you have written that "It is one (of) the first serious attempts to bridge the gap between fear-mongers on the right who insist that the legal nips and tucks of the past seven years have saved lives and the flamethrowers on the left who see every move by the Bush administration as a power grab." I wonder whether you have actually read the book. I did, and I was quite upset and deeply shocked regarding his position on the torture of prisoners at the Guantanamo prisons when I read some portions of the book. It is not correct to say that he builds a bridge. He doesn't. Through the thicket of his legalese verbiage I could still see where he stood reagrding the unspeakable horrors and torture inflicted on the prisoners: in the middle of Dick Chaney's yard, fist-thumping with the Vice President. He clearly sympathizes with the Bush administration and the torturers.

In his review of this book, Professor CURTIS A. BRADLEY, Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy Studies at Duke University, has written (Foreign Affairs, July/Aug 2008): “Yet when it comes to the issue of torture, Wittes appears to waver in his approach. He makes clear that he supports the interrogation tactic that the British used in 1946 with the wife of Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, in which they threatened to send her sons to a country where they would likely be killed.”