Alan Dershowtiz, and the time is right for a shower of pre-emptive assassinations ... why not dial up a hit today?

(Above: Clive Owen in a field).

Alan Dershowitz makes a powerful argument for state sponsored terrorism in Hold the front page, spies faked a passport.

Seems everyone's doing it - faking passports and killing people in a rather obvious faux pas style in hotels - so what the heck, everybody should keep on doing it.

Every good intelligence agency uses stolen and forged passports. The British have been especially adept at this means of spycraft. No country that uses fake passports in their intelligence operations has the moral authority to complain about the alleged misuse of passports in this case.

Find a body in your local hotel room? Don't worry about a murder investigation, likely as not it's just another hit of the day, conducted by people using stolen and forged passports. Complain about it? Come on, you don't want to end up a moral hypocrite do you? Just let the Russians and the British and everyone else get on with business as usual.

It seems foreign policy should be run according to the moral standards prevalent in a gaming house in a movie:

Hypocrisy is, after all, the homage that vice pays to virtue. I'm reminded of the famous scene in Casablanca, when Captain Renault declares, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

A croupier then approaches Renault and hands him a roll of currency: "Your winnings, sir."

Well I guess that's handy advice to the drug runners in North Korea and the wretched theocracy in Iran. Keep on doing what you like kind sirs, and don't forget to collect your winnings. Which reminds me, I must get that roulette wheel fixed. No, it's not broken, right at the moment it's spinning freely, and paying out good money! It needs to be fixed!

It seems the only people who have a legitimate beef are the actual passport holders, as regular nations rock around the world assassinating people they don't like:

The only people who have a legitimate grievance are those individuals whose passports may have been misused without their knowledge.

Everybody else get off the ride, you have no interest in this matter. As for the individuals suffering a little identity theft, where's the harm if it's a good cause. And who defines what's a good cause? Why Alan Dershowitz of course, and he can spot a terrorist deserving a good death from a mile away. So never mind the odd victim, when there can be juicy deserving victims, and stop all this do gooder liberal whining about giving terrorists the upper hand when it's paid assassins we should be supporting:

That's because no Western country wants to appear to be sympathetic to a terrorist. The "victims" of passport fraud are innocent civilians, but the injury they have suffered pales in comparison with the injuries - deaths -prevented by the well-deserved death of Mabhouh.

Yep, lynching, preferably at the hand of a lynch mob, is just what the modern world needs. Don't like someone? Think they've got a funny look in their eye? Mean you some harm? Might even be a witch? Perhaps part of a world wide Masonic conspiracy to take over the world?

Hey never no mind the law and order stuff. Strangle, stab, smother, shoot or perhaps just lynch them. Rule of law? Hah, you liberal phonies.

But wait a minute, don't nations have laws against identity theft?

On the Commonwealth level, under the Criminal Code Amendment (Theft, Fraud, Bribery & Related Offences) Act 2000 which amended certain provisions within the Criminal Code Act 1995,

135.1 General dishonesty

(3) A person is guilty of an offence if: a) the person does anything with the intention of dishonestly causing a loss to another person; and b) the other person is a Commonwealth entity. Penalty: Imprisonment for 5 years. (wiki on Identity theft).

Silly billy, laws aren't meant to be enforced, not when they involve discreet crimes amongst a couple of chums. It's only the individuals with a beef, not nations with silly little laws that don't count when you're on a mission from god.

But isn't that the logic terrorists use? Well okay sure, but remember you should always distinguish between individual and state terrorism, and then we can get into the details as to which states indulging in state terrorism are bad, and which are good (and yes as a guide Darth Vader is bad. He blew up a whole planet to enforce law and order).

You see, what's a little anarchy and chaos between civilised nations?

You know, I feel like bringing on that old 'would you have assassinated Hitler when he was twenty knowing what he went on to do later' meme, never mind that when he was twenty, they hadn't quite invented the technology for time travel.

It's a pity time travel's still coming, because Dershowitz has a splendid capacity for seeing the future, and with only one eye involved.

Soon after the terrorist attacks in Bali, which killed a large number of Australian tourists, I had the opportunity to meet the Australian prime minister, John Howard. I was writing a book at the time on pre-emption, and I asked him whether he would have authorised a pre-emptive attack on the terrorist who killed Australian citizens, if such an attack would have saved their lives.

His response was that Australia would have done anything it could to prevent these terrorist attacks. Anything, I guess, except misusing passports. Is there anybody who believes that Australia would not have used forged or stolen passports to prevent the Bali massacres? If Britain could have stopped the London subway attack by misusing passports, would MI6 have allowed the terrorism to go forward in the name of preserving passport integrity?

Well I guess the next logical question to ask is whether it might not have been a handy idea to assassinate Christ when he was still in his carpenter phase, seeing as how there's been all this unnecessary misery resulting from the spreading of his messianic word. Bugger passport integrity, as he wandered around spreading mischief.

Oh I know, they did assassinate him in the end, but too late to stop the tommy rot spreading. And don't get me started about Mohammed. How much better if they'd taken a pillow to him to stop his idle chatter.

Or for that matter, how much better if the Egyptians had taken out Abraham. By golly, there's a clear cut need for the Pharaohs to have invented a better secret service along with time travel ...

Come to think of it, there's any number of ways that pre-emptive assassinations might have been handy. No George Bush, no Iraq war, no Guantanamo Bay, no Abu Ghraib. And I guess pre-emptively the axis of weevils would also need to be taken out. Sorry Tony, sorry John.

But what's most piquant - having celebrated Rick's as a model for civilised societies, not to mention the illegal casinos that once littered Kings Cross to service the likes of Kerry Packer and humble gamblers (or brothels and speakeasies servicing people after grog and a fuck) - is the way Dershowitz gets himself into a tangle in rating laws and the difficulty of following them:

The high dudgeon expressed by foreign ministries over stolen passports is worse than hypocritical. It undercuts the war against terrorism.

Indeed. Please explain why there isn't an actual branch for stolen and fake passports at which Mossad agents - or any other state agency interested in assassinations - can front the window, and order up a decent variety, thereby ending the hurt and pain for people who've had their identities stolen. So much easier, and think of the mark up you could add for handling, postage and packaging.

There ought to be concern, among Western democracies, about how easy it is to use forged or stolen passports.

Huh? Like Mossad agents? Sorry, forgot, they don't count. They have an invisible Colgate freshness barrier.

I mean I love non-sequiturs as much as the next person, but this surely takes home the lamington. But at least we know Dershowtiz is appalled by the Dubai authorities conducting a murder investigation in their country - never mind the dead body, remember the chums - when there are much more fruitful lines of investigation:

Dubai should be conducting an investigation, but the focus should be on how simple it was for those carrying these phony passports to get into their country.

Just throw the body on the dump. Forget the killing! Just write it up as John Doe! DOA!

Focus on the passports! What the heck! Golly they're dumb in Dubai.

The misuse of passports is, after all, a primary tool used by terrorists to smuggle themselves into Western countries, from which they can engage in worldwide terrorism.

Not to mention Mossad agents, but you see they're the goodies and like James Bond, they have a licence to kill. Ineptly, in front of dozens of security cameras, so their every bungling move can be recorded and distributed around the world.

There are thousands of forged and fraudulent British passports circulating across the world today. Many are in the hands of terrorists. That should be the focus of any investigation, not the occasional and controlled misuse of passports by Western intelligence agencies to combat terrorism.

Yep, all this talk of murder is so unseemly. That's not a corpse, that's a terrorist. And as Shakepeare once said, first kill all the lawyers, and that'll take care of the bulk of terrorists ...

Whomever snuck into Dubai using fake passports may have done that country a service in warning them to tighten up their passport procedures.

Next time it may be a terrorist who tries to enter the country. Wait! Isn't that exactly what happened when Mabhouh walked through security using a real passport with his real name?

Huh? Surely this is not just non sequitur city, it's a new tower of babel.

Wrap it up for us Alan. Give us a dose of conspiracy, paranoia, and a foaming frothing fulmination about the disgraceful way people are allowed to travel on a legitimate passport if they have no crime on record which produces a flag in the system:

I guess in Dubai you don't have to use a fake passport if you're a terrorist, but you do if you're trying to stop terrorists; at least if the terrorism is directed only against Israel.

I guess Dubai is less concerned about letting terrorists into the country with real passports than in letting those who would stop terrorism into the country with fake passports.

It's a topsy-turvy world out there.

Oh yes, it's a topsy-turvey world, this world of Rick's cafe and gambling and state sponsored killings, by drones or pillows or silenced weapons.

Still, it's a fair point. I guess there's nothing like a little free wheeling assassination to uphold the standards of the law. Killing's great if it's not for fun or profit - well, okay, a little fun and profit, but only if it's endorsed by the state.

At least, if 'do anything you can get away with' is your idea of the law. By golly that Aleister Crowely might just have been right with his "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law".

In much the same way as I suppose it's only fair dibbs to rabbit on about the nuclear threat, while busy developing a nuclear threat.

The funny thing is that Dershowitz is allegedly a professor of law, but compared to his one-eyed cheerleading for the law-breaking ways of Israel, there's more understanding of moral complexity in the Bourne trilogy.

"Look at us ... look at what they make you give", says Clive Owen as he dies forlornly in a field, his assassination attempt a failure.

Indeed. Look at you, Mr Dershowitz, look at what you scribble.

(Below: and now Pierce Brosnan, a former James Bond is playing a politician who deserves pre-emptive assassination in the sexually transgressive Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer. Talk about a topsy turvy world. Sheesh, if you can't kill a ghost writer, who else can't you kill!)