It's the rule of law, stupid

Matthew Yglesias is right:

The problem is that the evidentiary basis for believing the people in question had al-Qaeda connections now turns out to have been illegally obtained evidence from the broader NSA program. And then the problem reiterates itself -- if the listening-in stage of the program reveals anything interesting, you can't use that in a court either. You can't use it to get further warrants, you can't use it as the basis of a prosecution, basically you can't use it at all. So if you want to act, you're going to need to do one of these detention-without-trials deals or maybe a "rendition" or a military tribunal or what have you. And then, once the guy's in custody, if he tells you anything you can't use that either. So the whole process starts again and soon enough there's an entire parallel justice system operating entirely in secret without any oversight or real rules.

And that's the optimistic scenario in which all of the relevant people are maximally honest, honorable, and competent. Leaving aside the reality that nobody with a single shred of honesty or basic human dignity would be working for George W. Bush at this point, that's simply not a realistic picture of any large-scale enterprise. Things are bound to go wrong -- badly wrong -- when you have all these people operating outside the law without any checks or scrutiny.

I hate to sound off on Ignatieff again, but this is why he scares me so much. By oh so ruefully conceding that torture may be "necessary", Ignatieff is essentially giving up on the rule of law. Wholesale.

I don't know how much more clearly it needs to be put: Torturing people for information - when they haven't been convicted of any crime by due process - makes a mockery of our claims to be a liberal democracy. Period. It really doesn't matter whether our motives are pure, or whether we're conscious of being "The Lesser Evil" as Iggy puts it. It's not a sign of moral complexity or intellectual bravery - it's just building the intellectual framework for Bushism. We can pretend that we're doing it to protect liberal democracy, but if we've already started torturing people, then we've really already lost.