I must say that I was surprised not so much with the heated reactions to the post below about civil liberties (which I expected) but the over-interpretation of it, or rather projection on to it. More than a few readers seem to read this passage — “a good deal less doctrinaire on civil liberties issues than, I suspect, many of the readers of this site … And a lot of the things that were done in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were, I think, justifiable in theory, if not always in execution.” — as clearly justifying the use of torture to extract confessions or for any other purpose.
Perhaps my interpretive skills are flagging, but can someone point out the reference to torture here? Torture does not exhaust the range of issues covered by civil liberties, to say the least.
