Proponents of torture love bringing up the ticking time bomb scenario, despite the fact it’s a straw man. It’s basically a fun “what if” game you play with severe and debilitating pain. What if there was a ticking time bomb somewhere in a US city, and all you had to do was splash some water in a terrorist’s face to find out where? Would you throw a moist towelette at a terrorist to save ten thousand lives?

In the link above, Holder handles the question fairly well: he rejects the premise, because he doesn’t believe that bringing a person to the brink of death via filling his water with lungs is the only (or a reliable) method available to get information from the person. But what I’d really like is to hear someone answer it by extending the hypothetical.

Okay, so we waterboard him, and he tells us the bomb is 50 miles that-a-way. But we get there and it turns out he just lied, and it was actually 75 miles in the other direction, which we found out quite suddenly when it blew up. What have we gained except some extra storage space where our soul used to be?