Torture and the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario (TTBS)

As people know, I am not a John McCain fan. I found his kissing up to Falwell disgusting, his willingness to endorse Bush unsettling, and his romp through Baghdad ridiculous.

But during the GOP debate the other night, he was exactly right about torture. While the other seemed to be in a one-upsmanship battle to show who was more willing to torture (I think Romney won that--evidently Mormons don't sweat torture. But then again, neither do Baptists--er, the SBC leadership) McCain categorically said that we don't torture. As AL noted, that alone is no small point:

" I would point out that discussing torture in an appropriately somber tone--as opposed to pandering to people's worst instincts in order to win applause--is no small difference. Even if tone were the only difference between McCain and his opponents on this issue, it would still be a significant difference. Watching Giuliani, Romney, and the second-tier wannabes trip over each other to endorse extreme interrogation techniques the other night was more than a little unsettling."

McCain also rejected the Fox News scenario mongers. Britt Hume practically salivated as he described the theoretical bombing of American shopping malls and the scum bags that the Americans now held in custody who knew where the next bomb was going off. What do you do? What do you do? McCain knew that this is not a movie where you can jump a speeding bus over a 100 foot chasm. He said, just as straightforward that this scenario was a one in a million scenario (and subtext--shame on Fox for trotting it out). AL agrees:

If you construct the right scenario (nuclear bomb about to go off, suspect knows the target, etc.) just about anyone will answer yes to this question. But that's not at all surprising or informative. After all, it's possible to construct a hypothetical scenario where you'd be morally justified in shooting a little girl in the head (you're in a cave running out of air, there are four other younger children, they'll all die unless you off yourself and the oldest kid, etc.). The bottomline is that all of us are capable of simple utilitarian moral reasoning. If you are presented with a choice between something very bad and something even worse, the moral logic is pretty clear.

As AL notes, just because you can construct a scenario where you do that worse thing, you don't make that worse choice legal--which is what Bush and company want to do.

As I have noted before, I worry about this kind of thinking in many areas of our society. In this case, they judge the morality or efficacy of the TTBS and then refuse to really look at the real use of torture and the real victims of it. Our commenter did the same thing. The people he claimed we were not technically torturing were, in his mind, all guilty terrorists. It is a vastly different moral scenario when you consider that we don't have a clue if we are even "interrogating" the right people. Or have we completely forgotten

"Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was abducted by the Bush administration during a layover at JFK Airport on his way home to Canada, and then brought to Syria to be 'interrogated.' He was kept in a tiny cell for the next 10 months in Syria and was repeatedly tortured. All along, he was guilty of nothing and had no ties of any kind to terrorism."

Yet the same thinking justifies abstinence only programs that don't work, and defends a death penalty that is biased and flawed to a shocking degree.