There are a good number of people who believe in the hypothetical situation that torture is justified in the ticking time bomb scenario. That is, a nuclear or biological weapon is about to detonate and kill thousands, maybe millions of people.
This is presented as a no-brainer — sacrifice one to save thousands. What’s not as obvious to the casual observer is that this is little more than a fairytale used to justify the abandonment of American principles and morals.
Let’s look at what would be needed to make this scenario plausible. First, we have to capture a terrorist with all the pertinent information. Second, the capture has to happen in that narrow window of opportunity before the attack occurs. Third, we need to know about the plot and know this terrorist, this person, has the information we need. Fourth, we need to know enough about the plot to anticipate and identify those responsible, but for some strange reason, we are missing several key details that we can only obtain by torturing this person.
For those who still think this scenario is a possibility or even probability, let us look to our own experience with terrorism. If we had caught one of the Sept. 11 hijackers just prior to the attacks, should we have tortured him to get him to give up information? If you support the ticking time bomb scenario, you would. I might not believe in torture, but there is a very powerful part of me that still wants those men to suffer as much as possible and for us to do what ever we can to prevent that attack.
The only problem is we did catch one of the hijackers— Zacarias Moussaoui. The FBI field supervisor in Minneapolis went as far in his warning as to say that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” Moussaoui was released because there wasn’t sufficient evidence.
This is the ticking time bomb scenario. We knew al-Qaida was planning something and we arrested a terrorist with the pertinent information. Yet we didn’t know it. Hindsight is 20/20, and in the covert underworld of black ops and terrorism, nothing is known for certain. Our intelligence agencies are not omniscient.
We can’t operate from the position that we can kill, torture and imprison the world’s terrorists. Torture is designed to win battles, not wars. Think of the past great powers that relied heavily on torture to wage war: The Nazis, the Soviets, the Japanese, the French in Algeria, America in Vietnam. How did those wars go?
The blowback effects of torture were summed up perfectly by journalist Mark Danner. In November 2003, he asked a young Iraqi from Falluja about the rising resistance to the U.S. presence. The Iraqi said: “It is a shame for the foreigners to put a bag over their heads, to make a man lie on the ground....This is a great shame for the whole tribe. It is the duty of that man, and of that tribe, to get revenge on this soldier... Their duty is to attack them, to wash the shame. The shame is a stain, a dirty thing — they have to wash it. No sleep — we cannot sleep until we have revenge. They have to kill soldiers.”
Nick Miner is a political science graduate student.
