A great post:

One of the key things that conservatives ought to remember (and which we notice all the time in liberal proposals) is that INTENTIONS DO NOT EQUAL OUTCOMES.  The government is horribly incompetent at all sorts of things and we ought not abandon that insight when analyzing proposals of people who allege that they are our allies (the idea that Bush is a conservative ally is something I'd like to argue about on another day--but my short answer is that he isn't).

As with limitations on free speech, I don't trust the government to be able to fairly and nimbly navigate the rules that would be necessary to  make certain that it only used a legal right to torture  when it was the right choice.  Sadly this is no longer a hypothetical question.  In actual practice, we find that Bush's administration has tortured men who not only didn't know anything about what they were being tortured about, but weren't even affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Let me say that again. Bush's administration has tortured men who were factually innocent.

Not men who got off on technicalities. Factually Innocent.

We also have over a hundred deaths in US interrogation/custody. God knows how many of the murdered were innocent. You give government these tools - let alone one man with no oversight - and you are risking oblivion as a free society. This is a conservative position.