Only Too Ordinary Rendition

I am as sickened as anyone else by the CIA's flagrant use of Britain as a staging post in the transportion of prisoners to torture by the sorts of regimes to which our allegedly so high-minded foreign policy necessarily allies both us and the Americans. As much as anything else, torture is useless (at least if one's aim is to uncover the truth), since people will say pretty much anything in order to make the torture stop.

But it has to be said that we ourselves forbid, say, ninety-day detention without charge not least in order to prevent torture. And it seems that we are not going to bother so forbidding for very much longer. All in all, it is impossible to escape the question of what, exactly, we are supposed to be fighting for.