Saturday, December 17, 2005
(4:42 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Ticking Timebomb Scenario
We're all familiar with the "ticking timebomb" argument in favor of torture:We might be faced with a terrorist who knew the location of a nuclear device that was about to go off and not have enough time to get the information out of him using non-coersive means. In this case, every decent human being would be willing to torture this person in order to prevent the deaths of millions of innocent people. Therefore, the government should be given broad discretion to use torture in a wide variety of situations.The last part is a logical leap, to be sure, but it seems to be an argument that a lot of people find very compelling, probably because it sounds very tough and realistic.
I was thinking, though -- when would this situation come up? (This has been discussed in detail on many blogs, and I apologize to everyone, such as Belle Waring, for not linking to those posts.) It would have to be a situation in which the government knew for a fact that the terrorist knew where the bomb was and that we would be able to extract the information from him in time, though only through the use of torture. Clearly, the only way this could ever happen in real life would be if the government put him up to it in the first place. That is, they track down some Islamic extremist, somehow psychologically profile him so that they know that he won't cave under normal interrogation methods but will "break" relatively quickly if tortured, and they send some government agents disguised as terrorists to give him a bomb and tell him to hide it somewhere in Los Angeles or wherever and set it to go off at a certain time. Track him up until like an hour before the thing's going to go off, then capture him, torture him, and collect the bomb (which, just to be safe, doesn't even have to be real). A glorious pronouncement by Alberto Gonzalez, talk show appearances for the brave agents who weren't afraid to torture, perhaps we'll even get lucky and some fringe Senator will want to have these guys put on trial so that the usual suspects can grandstand -- the whole media package can be arranged.
Suddenly, it's no longer a hypothetical situation -- this really happened! And all these hand-wringing liberals are trying to hold back the government from doing what it needs to do to prevent nuclear apocalypse, etc. They don't understand what we're dealing with here!
No, they really don't.
