Illegal Surveillance not required to foil the recent attacks

Glenn Greenwald makes an important point about all the crowing on the right that the foiled terrorist plot proves the need for the Bush attacks on our civil liberties:

... Bush supporters have been attempting to exploit the U.K. terrorist plot to bolster support for an array of extremist and lawless Bush policies -- from warrantless eavesdropping to torture -- even though there is not a shred of evidence that any of those policies played any role whatsoever, either in the U.S. or England, in impeding this plot.

The point obviously is that this plot was foiled without resorting to illegal surveillance techniques, which, if it proves anything, proves the illegal techniques are not needed.