When it was revealed that the Bush administration was violating U.S. law in eavesdropping on certain phone conversations without a warrant, the uproar that followed focused on this blatant disregard for the rule of law and the arrogant failure to even ask the Congress to amend the law to make it easier to eavesdrop on people. Screw it, the Bush administration reasoned, we'll do what we want and that's that.

A secondary concern was the rule of the U.S. phone companies for their involvment in the eavesdropping scheme. They broke the law also, didn't they? When you break the law in this country, you get sued. Bush is now trying to make the telecommunications industry immune from these lawsuits. If Bush and the phone companies have their way, the lawsuits will be dismissed and another sorry chapter in American history is swept under the rug. Bad idea all around.
But, hey, breaking the law isn't what it used to be.

Our race to the bottom doesn't stop there. It only starts there. Like I said, breaking the law isn't what it used to be.

According to the February 14, 2008 New York Times:

The Senate voted Wednesday to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods that have been used by the Central Intelligence Agency against high-level terrorism suspects. The vote, following House passage of the measure in December, set up a confrontation with President Bush, who has threatened to veto it.

Some people think waterboarding is fine. Waterboarding is defined as torture under international law. Since our government does not care about international law and does whatever it wants, we can rationalize our way around this. The most common way to do this is to suggest that waterboarding and other forms of torture come in handy under the "ticking bomb" scenario. Joe Lieberman, Al Gore's running mate in 2000, repeated this theory recently: In the worst case scenario — when there is an imminent threat of a nuclear attack on American soil — Lieberman said that the president should be able to certify the use of waterboarding on a detainee suspected of knowing vital details of the plot."

But the ticking bomb theory of torture is a canard. That scenario never happens:

Human rights organisations, professional and academic experts, and military and intelligence leaders, have absolutely rejected the idea that torture is ever legal or acceptable, even in a so-called ticking bomb situation. They have expressed grave concern about the way the dramatic force and artificially simple moral answers the ticking bomb thought-experiment seems to offer, have manipulated and distorted the legal and moral perceptions, reasoning and judgment of both the general population and military and law enforcement officials. They reject the proposition, implicit or explicit, that certain acts of torture are justifiable, even desirable. They believe that simplistic responses to the scenario may lead well-intentioned societies down a slippery slope to legalised and systematic torture. They point out that no evidence of any real-life situation meeting all the criteria to constitute a pure ticking bomb scenario has ever been presented to the public, and that such a situation is highly unlikely.

The value of the ticking bomb scenario to justify torture is that this extremely narrow exception swallows the rule. It's like supporting the death penalty because some guy killed 15 people on videotape and everyone knows he did it, without considering the many people who've walked off death row after the courts decide that the guy didn't commit the crime at all.

Of course, the problem with all these proposed measures -- letting the phone companies off the hook and the use of torture -- is that once the terror threat goes away, these new rules will remain in effect. Future U.S. presidents and other demagogues will find a way to justify continued support for these new rules in light of new "threats," real or imagined. That's how it works. Scare us into supporting new oppressive measures, and those measures stay on the books forever.