America has built a system of public integrity investigation so completely unfettered by the usual norms of a legal system that a person can be blithely destroyed with no trace of accountability among the parties to her destruction but, rather, self-congratulation on all sides. One strains to recall another incident in which a President, a prosecutor, Congress and the press teamed up so cruelly to publicise theinnermost reaches of the soul of so minor an offender. It has never happened before, and you do not have to be a privacy fetishist to realize that something has gone terribly wrong.

Lewinsky was forced, under threat of criminal prosecution, to discuss the most intimate details of her life. Her testimony was supplemented by e-mail messages carefully undeleted from her computer's hard drive, and by scrutinising letters that she wrote but chose not to send. She was, in short, stripped of the right -- so hated by journalists but essential in any civilised society -- to censor herself.

After Kenneth Starr collected from her the sort of interior discussions we all have with ourselves and all presume to control, Congress not only used these discussions against Clinton but dumped them into the public domain so that Lewinsky could be fodder for her own ridicule. Nobody's dignity could survive this sort of compelled self-incrimination, against which the Constitution offers no protection.

All of this could nothave happened were it not for the structural defect in the independent-counsel law that let Starr become a proxy for a congressional impeachment investigation in the first place. Imagine for a minute that -- back in January -- Congress had been forced to investigate the Lewinsky matter itself. It is simply unimaginable that members of Congress, in an open hearing, would have been willing to ask Lewinsky the details of her encounters with Clinton.

They would have been too embarrassed, and had any one of them overcome his timidity and dared to ask about, say, the cigar incident, his phone lines would have been flooded by outraged constituents. It was only by getting a prosecutor to perform the investigation in the secrecy of the grand jury room that these political constraints could be waved away.

As it happened, of course, there was no real-time political feedback. Those asking the questions were not elected who cared what the public thought. They could ask Lewinsky anything, and they did. Members ofCongress were, thereby, relieved of all responsibility for the investigation, save disseminating the packaged product at the end.

As a result of this legal sleight of hand, Lewinsky was forced to answer for the public a series of questions that nobody would ever have had the guts to ask her in public. Throughout the recent imbroglios over which pieces of Starr's evidence to disseminate, our public debate has juxtaposed the people's right to know against the president's dignity and the President's privacy.

But what about Monica's dignity and privacy? That has not been, at any time, the operative consideraton. Not for Clinton, whose own testimony dared Starr to be maximally intrusive in his questions to Lewinsky. Not, certainly, for Starr, who considered no detail his own witness had given him too humiliating to include in his report. Not for Congress, which interpreted the Constitution's impeachment clause as license to release this report and thousands of pages of supporting documents. Not, apparently,for Maureen Dowd -- to harp on the press corps' most grievous offender -- who has used Lewinsky gratuitously in repeated columns as a foil for catty witticisms against, in turn, Clinton and Starr alike.

The kicker is that in this system we've created, nobody's responsible for what happened to Lewinsky. Starr was merely investigating high-level wrongdoing under a lawful jurisdictional mandate, after all, and he was obligated to report to Congress under the statute. Congress was merely making available to the public information that could form the basis of a presidential impeachment; who could object to that? Clinton was defending himself, as any criminal target is permitted to do. And Dowd and her ilk are members of the free press -- and the First Amendment, as everyone knows, means you never have to say you're sorry.

LA Times-Washington Post