"THEY'LL TELL YOU WHO STARTED THE $%*&* CHICAGO FIRE..." Matt, writing about Jane Mayer's essential article about the Bush administration's torture policies, notes that the torture produces highly unreliable information, and is clearly being deployed for other purposes. I'll have more about this in a longer piece about Stephen Holmes's new book later this month, but this is a larger problem with apologists for arbitrary executive power that have emerged since 9/11. These arguments just assume that reducing constraints on state power increases its efficacy in thwarting terrorism. But this is a highly dubious proposition empirically, and certainly liberal democracy is not founded on the idea that state performance is improved by secrecy and a lack of institutional checks. At any rate, it shouldn't simply be assumed that violations of civil liberties improve the state's ability to fight terrorism. Often, arbitrary power frees the state to pursue agendas that are unrelated to legitimate objectives or actually counterproductive. The new wiretapping program, which requires effectively no evidence that the eavesdropping has any relationship to terrorism at all, is another case in point. --Scott Lemieux
