The blogger Patterico, on waterboarding: “It’s 2 1/2 minutes of a mild form of torture with no lasting physical effects, performed on an undoubtedly evil terrorist and mass murderer, to obtain information certain to obtain thousands of lives. When someone says that such mild torture would be morally unjustified, that answer to me lacks common sense.”

I know Patterico isn’t the only one to share that view, but what I’m wondering is, doesn’t this also justify some other country torturing our people when they’re captured?

Suppose Iran captures a spec ops units inside their borders. They know there are highly-placed people in America advocating for an attack on Iran; they know the attack could cost thousands of lives; and while our soldiers aren’t evil, it’s quite possible the Iranians would see them as such under the circumstances. So by Patterico’s logic, wouldn’t the Iranians be justified in waterboarding our military to learn what they know about any imminent attack? And if not, why not?

While I think that’s a valid question, I also think the whole hypothetical discussion is irrelevant. As I’ve noted before, the “ticking bomb scenario” has nothing to do with any torture case that’s turned up so far in the War on Terror, so it doesn’t serve any real point. I could probably come up with a hypothetical situation in which a suicide bomber saves thousands of lives by his actions, but that would say absolutely nothing about the way suicide bombing is used in the real world.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Questions, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.