Here’s the warmup hypothetical:

The Vice-President of the United States is planning to start global thermonuclear war and has the capability to do so. You are a Secret Service agent assigned to guard him (you’re an eyewitness, so there’s no doubt about his guilt). You can prevent this entire chain of events by shooting him through the skull right now.

Do you do so? (I would assume you’d say yes. After all, as a Secret Service agent, you’ve already agreed to kill people under some circumstances, so you can’t very well be absolutist about not killing when the alternative is global thermonuclear war.)

Now for the actual disgusting hypothetical:

He’s already set the beginning of global thermonuclear war in motion (you’re an eyewitness, so there’s no doubt about his guilt), but it can be stopped if you can convince the world that he specifically (not someone else like the President) has done it. Do you torture him until he confesses? See, torture actually works for eliciting a desired confession (as opposed to for getting information). And a fair number of people believe confessions even if they’re coerced. So do you torture him?

For the nastier hypothetical:
He didn’t start the leadup to the war, the President did. He’s entirely innocent. The President has been dealt with, but if the world believes he started it, the war will happen. But if you can convince the world that the innocent Vice-President started it, then billions of lives may be saved. Do you torture the innocent man?

Torture works great for making scapegoats, innocent or not, confess. It’s terrible for getting information. If you’re going to make up these hypotheticals, make up hypotheticals connected with likely reality.

I suspect the motivations for torture among at least some of the Bush administration officials were that they needed scapegoats (because they weren’t trying or succeding at catching most actual terrorists, let alone masterminds); and they needed various sorts of false confessions, particularly confessions which claimed that the confessors were very powerful and were only caught due to the unchecked power of the administration (which the administration used to advertise how important it was that they be given more and more unchecked, unaccoutable power). And if this PR the administration wanted would have saved billions of lives, it might perhaps be justifiable, but obviously their PR will not save any lives at all and will indirectly hurt a very large number of people.

Patterico Says:

But Jill, I’m interested in your firm “No” to the hypothetical posed. Remember the assumptions of the question — which is, keep in mind, a hypothetical, so I get to make up assumptions that might not be realistic:
1) The waterboarding lasts only 2 1/2 minutes.

Irrelevant, FYI. 2 1/2 minutes of drowning is still torture.

2) The waterboarding is of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the 9/11 attacks.

For the sake of your stupid hypothetical, you need to add that you have conclusive evidence which has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he planned the 9/11 attacks. In other words, you need to add that he’s already had a fair trial (no torture) and been convicted. (In actual fact, we have no idea, but he probably didn’t, and he must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.)

If you don’t add this, your clause 3 is meaningless: it means “The torture is of someone who may or may not be guilty of anything.”

So we’re specifying that we’re talking only about torture of already-convicted criminals here now.

3) The information obtained is reliable.

Sorry, you’ve contradicted yourself. Information obtained through torture simply isn’t reliable. If the information happened to be accurate, *that was sheer luck* — you would have had better chances of getting accurate information by making an educated guess. “Reliable” has a meaning which is not the same as “accurate”.

Perhaps you could amend this to “The information obtained is accurate.”

4) It saves thousands of lives.

If I get unreliable, but coincidentally accurate, information which saves thousands of lives by paying thousands to my private astrologer, that doesn’t mean it was worth it. And if my method of getting unreliable information is torture, it’s even less worth it.

The answer is very firmly no, it’s not worth it. Don’t you get it?

As for the “ABC news said it happened”, the Bush administration has been caught planting lies in the press so much it’s not even funny. Specifically, they repeatedly claimed that warrantless wiretapping was key to catching various wannabe terrorist cells, and in all cases it ended up being proved completely untrue (usually by the officials involved in actually catching them). The Bush administration should therefore be expected to do the same thing when they’re trying to promote torture.

The issue is how likely is waterboarding to give you useful info? In Ross’s report, he says some detainees gave up phony info, but KSM gave up good info.

He gave up old info. It may have been “good” in the sense that it was corroborated (and I don’t see much in the report to indicate that), but it wasn’t time-sensitive.

The “ticking time bomb” scenario relies on time pressure — if there’s no time pressure, then there’s no immediate need to get the information by any means necessary, and therefore, torture is not a valid means of obtaining the information.

I’m sure Patterico would come up with SOME weaselly reason why KSM’s kids would just HAVE to be tortured in that scenario. After all, like Bill Frist diagnosing Terri Schiavo via a videotape, Mr. Pat has already determined the guilt of everybody the US has in custody – no trials, evidence, or witnesses needed. (Saves a lot of time when guilt is known right up front.)

‘Course, when the KSM kids’ torture is actually performed, Mr. Pat would have to leave the room (he’s a little sensative about that kind of thing), but he would stand in the hall, hearing the guilty screams of those kids, knowing that what was happening to them was a sacred and holy act on behalf of Merrica, God’s Country On Earth, and sanctioned by God’s Appointed Commander In Chief…

one note for the moderators: it’s your perfect right to run the site as you please, even though moderation in general does offend me somewhat. but if you must moderate, blocking a comment outright offends me less than cherry-picking sentences and passages one by one. all-or-nothing at least lets me speak my piece in whole, or else not speak at all, which both are easier to deal with than being edited. and just to ensure some moderator sees that, i’ll quote Carlin: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.

Note: I’m not conceding that your original hypothetical is in any way plausible, and please see Christopher and Zuzu’s responses above for why. But IF we do as you originally asked and take your hypothetical as you originally presented it, the questions I’ve asked are extremely relevant.

Now, of course, shooting a random stranger is far less likely to result in a net good than waterboarding a known mass murderer and terrorist like KSM.

But if, somehow, waterboarding KSM were as unlikely to yield useful information as shooting a random stranger is to kill a terrorist, I would agree it would change the picture.

The issue is how likely is waterboarding to give you useful info? In Ross’s report, he says some detainees gave up phony info, but KSM gave up good info. If all terrorists gave up good info, and that were known, it would make the action seem more moral.

I.e. results may be largely irrelevant to the morality of an action, but *expected* results aren’t.

Again, I think it’s interesting that this formulation results in the morality of the action being determined largely by whether the terrorists cooperate.

Yours is the best argument against the hypo I have seen, and I have been waiting for someone to make it.

If you answer “yes” to my hypo, but argue against it on the grounds you have, it does mean that the morality of the action depends largely on whether you knew that it would be effective.

Which means it turns largely on whether the terrorist lies to us.

I think there’s an interesting discussion in there somewhere.

I get the feeling that if they did manage to extract actionable information as a result of torture (incredibly unlikely) it still wouldn’t be acted on.

In any case, most “terrist” targets would probably be in “blue” states and are of no interest to the All Politics, All The Time wingnut brigade in charge.

As long as Bush’s El Rancho De Brusho is left untouched, he couldn’t care less what happens to the rest of us…

Please answer my hypothetical, Patterico.

To try and extract intelligence in an emergency situation, would you waterboard and/or cut off the fnigers and toes of KSM’s small children while he watched?

No.

Even in the ever-popular ticking time bomb scenario beloved of 24? Even if it would potentially save thousands of lives? Why not?