One of Bush supporters’ recurring rationalizations for waterboarding and other forms of torture is the “ticking bomb” hypothetical where we have an imminent terrorist attack and only one way to stop it: Force the information out of the diabolical terrorist Jack Bauer (or whoever) just captured.
Wall Street Journal writer Bret Stephens, for instance, wrote recently that the issue with torture should be whether it’s effective, not over the ethics, especially considering “hypothetical cases where the alternative to waterboarding is terrorist attacks resulting in mass casualties among innocent civilians.”
When pro-torture people use this line of argument, everyone should remember that even if you agree, it has nothing to do with the torture practices in the global war on terror.
For all the administration’s exaggerated claims about its successes, they’ve never claimed that what’s happened in Abu Ghraib, in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas or the foreign torture chambers we’ve shipped prisoners to has been justified by stopping an imminent terrorist attack. They’ve claimed “harsh interrogation” produces valuable information (though of course it’s all classified so they can’t actually prove it), but that’s as far as it goes.
On the contrary, reports and first-hand accounts of Abu Ghraib show the standard use of torture was simply to “get information.” Not about imminent attacks. Not about ticking bombs, just to squeeze whatever people know out of them, if they knew anything.
And sometimes they didn’t, because suspected terrorists or people who were mistaken for terrorists got caught up in sweeps and interrogations too, and received the same treatment. As one contractor who worked at Abu Ghraib said, a common response to “I don’t know anything, you’ve got the wrong man!” was to work harder to make the man confess the “truth.”
I could go on about how torture (according to a wide variety of security professionals) isn’t more effective than persuasion at producing intel, and how humiliating it is that the leader of our country now champions a practice we used to condemn (while continuing to insist that no, of course we aren’t torturing anyone), but I need to get back to work.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.