This ticking time bomb means you lose your fingernails
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?
January 17th, 2009 00:26
That’s the same exact argument I made in my English class. I was still the only person in that class to think torture was a bad idea. But I did get a 99 for the week.
January 17th, 2009 01:16
Or you could just do what John McCain said he did: Tell your captors that your commanding officers are the starting lineup of the Arizona Cardinals. Substituting in the pro-football team of the city you’re campaigning in as necessary.
January 19th, 2009 11:46
That whole Cardinals thing’s not going to work so well now that those jerkfaces are two weeks away from being broadcast to 2 billion or so viewers.
January 28th, 2009 09:38
The ticking time bomb situation is exactly the one where torture is _least_ likely to work, because the person you’re interrogating knows they need only hold out for a limited time in order for their mission to succeed.
In the supremely unlikely event that torture was attempted, and it worked, and the bomb was defused; the correct followup is for the torturer to be arrested and tried, and, if appropriate, pardoned.