Comments (34)

Saint Augustine wrote on November 8, 2007 12:01 PM:

From what I've seen and heard so far I can't help but believe that Bush and Cheney are guilty of treason for employing techniques that are known to produce unreliable information and thus of harm to the American people.

I would change my opinion if the President were to submit to 90 seconds of Mr. Nance's demondstration of waterboarding and then give the nation his opinion.

Seth H. wrote on November 8, 2007 12:11 PM:

Wait... Some abortion techniques torture the woman? Like the ones they use when abortion isn't available legally?

JMOHR wrote on November 8, 2007 12:14 PM:

Yes, the ticking time bomb. We have had so many nuclear weapons hidden around the United States where we grabbed the right terrorist knowing that he knew exactly the information that it would take to stop the attack.

We need to attack this at the root. There are no ticking time bombs, never have been. The argument is used as an excuse to justify torture under far less dire circumstances. See the walk down the slope:

1. The suspect knows there are other terrorists in the US and those terrorists are planning to do something bad.

2. The suspect knows people who may be assisting terrorists who may be planning something bad.

3. The suspect may know people who are sympathetic to people who may be terrorists and may be planning on doing something bad.

Sheikh Kahlid has always been held up as the best example of gaining information. The sheikh was captured and water boarded. He confessed to many crimes. None of which provided actionable intelligence against future targets.

Sheikh Kahlid was caught with his computer which had a list of active AQ agents. The water boarding merely gave us confessions of doubtful validity and a lot of false leads. Any competent interrogator knows that there are better ways to break a suspect and gain valid information.

JMOHR wrote on November 8, 2007 12:15 PM:

Yes, the ticking time bomb. We have had so many nuclear weapons hidden around the United States where we grabbed the right terrorist knowing that he knew exactly the information that it would take to stop the attack.

We need to attack this at the root. There are no ticking time bombs, never have been. The argument is used as an excuse to justify torture under far less dire circumstances. See the walk down the slope:

1. The suspect knows there are other terrorists in the US and those terrorists are planning to do something bad.

2. The suspect knows people who may be assisting terrorists who may be planning something bad.

3. The suspect may know people who are sympathetic to people who may be terrorists and may be planning on doing something bad.

Sheikh Kahlid has always been held up as the best example of gaining information. The sheikh was captured and water boarded. He confessed to many crimes. None of which provided actionable intelligence against future targets.

Sheikh Kahlid was caught with his computer which had a list of active AQ agents. The water boarding merely gave us confessions of doubtful validity and a lot of false leads. Any competent interrogator knows that there are better ways to break a suspect and gain valid information.

P J Evans wrote on November 8, 2007 12:25 PM:

The ticking time bomb theory, to me, means that the entire national security apparatus has *already* failed.

shane wrote on November 8, 2007 12:32 PM:

Somebody better tell Jack Bauer... Oh, wait -- he's not with CTU any more! :-)

Mike wrote on November 8, 2007 12:35 PM:

I vote for putting this whole bogus "ticking time bomb" argument out to pasture. If it is brought up ever again we should just respond like the President and his minions, "That is a hypothetical question and we will not speculate on hypotheticals".

End of story.

Anna S. wrote on November 8, 2007 12:37 PM:

An academic writer named Henry Shue said the exact same thing about a year ago, in a paper called "Torture in Dreamland". In fact, he's such an influential writer on torture that there's a great chance that Franks has read the paper. It's available online as a pdf here:

http://www.case.edu/orgs/jil/archives/vol37no2and3/Shue.pdf

Shue makes the entirely accurate point that years of experience with torture clearly show that it takes time to get accurate information with torture techniques, time on the order of weeks. In fact, the faster you torture someone, the more likely they are to give you completely false information, and the more likely you are to believe them (because you don't have time to fact-check their accounts completely against outside sources). So ticking bomb cases are strawmen: in a real ticking bomb case, it wouldn't be possible to save the world even if you did torture your suspect in question, because you'd be forced to do torture the sloppy way, and you wouldn't get good information.

(Read the Shue paper. It's really good, and even though Shue is a professional philosopher, it's entirely accessible to lay-persons)

will o dwisp wrote on November 8, 2007 12:46 PM:

Google
"Verschärfte Vernehmung"
German for
"enhanced (sharpened) interrogation"

jeffgee wrote on November 8, 2007 12:47 PM:

And the GOP candidates (minus McCain) are falling over each other to show who can torture the most. They don't want to talk about how ineffective torture is for getting answers. Torture guarantees that the person being tortured will say anything the interrogators want to hear, not necessarily the truth, to make it stop.

TheraP wrote on November 8, 2007 1:10 PM:

Torture: So Shameful, They Have to Hide It.

bwindrip wrote on November 8, 2007 1:13 PM:

Saint Augustine November 8, 2007 12:01 PM

I firmly believe that anyone who doesn't consider waterboarding to be torture should submit to same.

And to at least partially offset the subject's belief that they will not die, continue the exercise for a minute or so after they signal that they've had enough.

parrot wrote on November 8, 2007 1:15 PM:

The "ticking timebomb" in this instance is how long this farce can go on without any legal basis. The courts and the law have to be employed to stop these goons and ghouls from employing color of authority to get their sadistic rocks off.

bwindrip wrote on November 8, 2007 1:26 PM:

Torture is not an effective means for the collection of actionable intelligence.

It is, however an gruesomely effective example that governments set for enemies (or dissidents) still at large.

Read Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine".

Anonymous wrote on November 8, 2007 2:07 PM:

Forget impeachment. They should be tried for war crimes.

Mary wrote on November 8, 2007 2:28 PM:

Aww, Hayden gave up on ticking time bomb a long time ago. His spiel on Charlie Rose (btw, has Hayden always had so many ticks and twitches - it was like watching someone keep hitting the restart button on a Max Headroom pieces) was that we need to employ all our "tools" way before then.

He twitchy point was that he thought it was a failure to not start using all the tools at the begining, bc getting to the ticking time bomb point would be a failure.

He didn't really go into the fact that, with actual investiations instead of just verbal parrying, the talking point that sounds so great about "ticking time bombs" has no support and legal defenses to felony depraved abuse lose their moorings in the years and years of continued detention and abuse.

Anonymous wrote on November 8, 2007 2:38 PM:

This premise is absurd: "uncooperative detainee has surefire knowledge of an imminent attack".

- how do you KNOW they have information?

If you "know" they have information, then you go to the SOURCE of that knowledge "about what they know".

The entire premise of the ticking time bomb is absurd: Why aren't those in law enforcement -- making the accusation -- being tortured? They were (supposedly) "told" something.

DrBB wrote on November 8, 2007 2:50 PM:

I think bwindrip nails it. It's about power and sending a message: We can and will do this to anyone we feel like, so shut up and do what we say. It's like the theater of executions and drawing and quartering. Exactly the same in fact. It has to be known to be effective, which is why the whole waterboarding thing is such an open "secret" and why the whole song-and-dance and shadow play about America Does Not Torture (but it would suck if our torturers got arrested) is so infuriatingly obvious.

Here's another take on it, from Dr Strangelove:

Ripper:
I mean when they tortured you, did you talk?

Mandrake:
Ah, oh no, I ah... I don't think they wanted me to talk, really. I don't think they wanted me to say anything. It was just their way of having... a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.

Dawn wrote on November 8, 2007 2:53 PM:

I agree the ticking time bomb question is absurd and I wish someone would answer to that effect next time Russert or someone else tries to make it sound like the definitive question. If you have only seconds or even a few hours to stop the time bomb, the 'torturee' could tell you any false information he dreamed up and you would have to act on it. What an absurd waste of time. It is just ridiculous.

Mark Hoffman wrote on November 8, 2007 3:27 PM:

In his excellent academic paper (http://www.case.edu/orgs/jil/archives/vol37no2and3/Shue.pdf), Henry Shue points out the three fatal problems with the so-called ticking time-bomb scenario ("so-called" because it could never, ever happen in the real world):

1) The right man: The torturer knows that they have the one person who knows where the bomb is hidden

2) Prompt and accurate disclosure: The torturer can force the "right man" (who may be a suicide bomber) to render accurate information about where the bomb is hidden instead of simply lying until the bomb explodes.

3) Rare, isolated case: After torturing the "right man," the torturers will not move on to torture the second-best "right man."

Problem #1 is all that matters. A simple thought experiment will tell you why that's so. The wannabe torturer says, "We're holding a man who knows where a nuclear bomb is hidden in New York City, and it’s set to go off in one hour. Would you torture him to find out where it's hidden?" You ask, "How do you know you have the right man?" There's no real-world answer to this question, because the only way the wannabe torturer could possibly KNOW that they have the "right man" is if they saw that man hide the bomb, in which case they'd already KNOW where it's hidden and thus wouldn't need to torture anyone. In any other case, they're torturing someone whom they THINK hid a bomb, but they don't KNOW the man hid a bomb. Do you want to torture someone based on what you only THINK you know? Only torturers want to do that.

The wannabe torturer might answer your question by saying, "Well, this man knows where the bomb is hidden because a reliable source told us that." Logically, you ask, "How does your source know this man hid the bomb?" The wannabe torturer might say, "Because he saw him hide it." You ask, "Why won't your source tell you where he hid it?" Again, the wannabe torturer has no real-world answer. Or the wannabe torturer responds to your second question by saying, "Our source heard about it from someone else, and our source has never lied to us." You ask, "How do you know your source's source isn't lying, and Why won't your source's source tell your source where the bomb is hidden so your source can tell you?" You can see where this leads. It's an infinite regression that demonstrates one basic truism: Torturers torture not to make us safer but because they like it.

Roberta wrote on November 8, 2007 4:04 PM:

I hope everyone knows about the suits for war crimes against Rumsfeld in Germany and France [http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1413907,00.html, http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/26/europe/EU-GEN-France-Rumsfeld-Torture-Complaint.php].

The AP reported:
"German federal prosecutors rejected that request in April, saying it was up to the U.S. to hold any inquiry.

"[Michael] Ratner, [president of the Center for Constitutional Rights,] said his group had tried to take the case to European courts because "no one (in the United States), not even the Congress, is ready to investigate the torture program," and because the case could not be brought with the International Criminal Court, as the United States is not a member."

The world knows what's happening here. It's our own people who don't. Pakistan may be overtly blocking free news reports, but the MSM here has been blocking the truth for years, with selective and slanted "reports" and outright omissions.

Roberta wrote on November 8, 2007 4:20 PM:

BTW--I hope someone knows how to track Rep. Franks's campaign "donations." I'd call him a good soldier for the Repubs, but if a lot of money comes his way, maybe he's more correctly a "good contractor."

Tejas Geek wrote on November 8, 2007 5:10 PM:

Remember, the law is ALWAYS designed for the general case, and in the general case, torture is always morally repugnant, less effective than other techniques, currently illegal and should remain illegal. If some weird-ass special case where it really really really is so damn important to torture someone actually occurs in the real world, then the people making the decision need to be so sure of the rightness of what they're doing that they're willing to face a jury of their peers. This "get out jail free card" BS for sadists and brown-shirts has got to stop if we're to remain a democracy.

rabbit wrote on November 8, 2007 5:10 PM:

Fantasies about torture seem to get some people fired up to vote Republican in the way that fantasies about pornography, homosexuality and abortion get other people fired up to vote Republican. The fact that it doesn't actually work on suspects has nothing to do with it, if it works on voters.

Renate wrote on November 8, 2007 5:50 PM:

Waterboarding is NOT torture. Sawing one's head off with a dull knife, or disembowling and then sawing the head off is. Then there's the electrocution torture. Which one is America doing? Get real people. Abortion-LEGAL abortion has killed women, and it IS torturous for the child within. To have your body dismembered or salted out-yeah that tickles.

Renate wrote on November 8, 2007 5:55 PM:

We've used waterbording 3 times in 3 years and all 3 times it worked. Again, waterbording is NOT TORTURE. I'm not voting based on the fantasy of whether we employ "torture" or not. I'm voting on which party keeps America safer and is willing to defend her.

judyinnm wrote on November 8, 2007 6:40 PM:

I think I'll vote for someone who will lead America back to where it was when we believed in the principles upon which this country was founded, and thrived, for over 200 years; and our elected officials' first duty was to protect & defend the Constitution of the United States of America. It's unamerican to be so scared of others that one is willing to sanction obscene, illegal government actions, in the name of keeping us "safe".

How does one wrap their mind around the idea that Iraqis should be willing to die for the kind of freedom we had; but we gladly give up those freedoms, in order to be safe. Are they braver than us?

garimundi wrote on November 8, 2007 6:40 PM:

"We've used waterbording 3 times in 3 years and all 3 times it worked."

This oft-repeated "fact" comes to you courtesy of the Bush Administration, makers of "The Overwhelming Evidence That There Was A Connection Between Al Qaeda And The Iraqi Government’’(Cheney 1/22/04).

Troll Patrol wrote on November 8, 2007 7:07 PM:

Troll Patrol duly notes that the poster calling self "Renate" above is not using the normal typeface that our poster by a similar name uses. We urge that you disregard posts at 5:10 and 5:50 as fake posts under a usually trusted name.

Anonymous wrote on November 8, 2007 7:51 PM:

Waterboarding is torture and it does not work. Period.

Evergreen2U wrote on November 9, 2007 2:47 AM:

The first waterboarding might have been the young teenage girls in our Puritan colonies....remember the one's who confessed to being witches????

Corrupt Corporate Cronies scrambling for the last oil dollar before the whole earth succumbs. Slimy oil thugs who someone else elected for their moral loving ways.

paul wrote on November 9, 2007 9:51 AM:

Following up on Hoffman above, the ticking-bomb scenario, in addition to all the other reasons why it makes no sense except as a phallus-extender (men, violence, explosions, c'mon), makes no sense because it violates even its own presuppositions. 3) isn't just that we won't then go on to torture lots of other people in "isolated" cases of necessity, it's that we won't continue torturing the person who supposedly knows where the bomb is.

If you're torturing someone, the reason for them to tell you something is to make the torture stop. And in particular the reason to tell you the truth is that when they find the ticking bomb (and presumably disarm it, because if they held out too long or it can't be disarmed then they're going to be just as angry as if you hadn't told them anything) is that then you'll lock them up in a nice clean quiet cell/kill them painlessly/let them go/whatever. But since you've just demonstrated that you're uncivilized and sadistic, the person you're torturing has no reason to believe any promises you make, except just maybe the short-term one that if they tell you something, anything, you'll stop torturing them. And even that one is dicey, because in a true (ha) ticking-bomb situation the last thing you want to do is stop torturing when the subject breaks. If you do that, the evildoer could just name a couple of particularly inaccessible places and run out the clock. Instead, you dispatch a team to the supposed bomb location, and then you start torturing again, claiming that there's no bomb there...

Renate wrote on November 11, 2007 6:40 PM:

You all must drink the same purple koolaid. I was born in East Germany. None of you have a clue as to what real torture is or living under a government where you have no right to free thought and where you are spied on by your neighbors, family, ect.,. I re-submit: Waterboarding is not torture. It has been used 3 times in 3 years. It has produced results all three times.
Troll Patrol-you don't like facts? And, I am who I am. I'm not trying to be a fake Renate-I am the "real" Renate LOL.
I guess you can stick your head in the sand when you read something you don't like. I guess only one side of the debate is allowed here?. Reminds me of the DDR before the wall came down.

tom saunders wrote on December 10, 2007 11:18 AM:

i think taht eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

thank you, tom