At that instant Boston is vaporized by the terrorist’s real device.

1) I could spin out a scenario in which we have a fuse of an arbitrarily long length. We might have weeks or months. We threaten the terrorist with increasingly intense torture if he lies. If he gives us a location we can send agents to check it out. We have lots of time to make his pain increasingly unbearable if he lies. Many, many people would crack under these conditions. I know I would. And if I would, so would you. Maybe not Super Terrorist who can withstand all pain, but many real people. In any case, assuming as I do that we have tried everything else unsuccessfully, it is worth a shot to find out whether or not we got unlucky and captured Super Terrorist.

2) It is possible that we might learn of the plot at an even earlier stage. Let’s say they are still in the planning stages in Pakistan. We know they have acquired the nuke and are planning on detonating it in a U.S. city. But they haven’t even gotten the weapon into the U.S. yet. It is still in Pakistan. But we don’t know where in Pakistan. But we have captured one of the terrorists who does know. We have tried non-torture techniques for weeks but they have failed. Now we have to torture him. There is no danger of the bomb going off at that time—certainly not in Boston.

I mean seriously, if anyone actually has such a device and is both stupid and utterly evil enough to use it they will bring it into the US in a shipping container, load it into a heavy-duty delivery van, drive it directly to the location where they want to detonate it, and then … detonate it.

See 2) above.

It also fails to address the growing evidence that Dick Cheney and his gang derived personal satisfaction and enjoyment from ordering torture

As I have said, I’m not defending Cheney in any way. he should be tried for war crimes and as far as I can tell convicted. We have not been facing a TTB.

Let’s just continue your hypothetical a bit, since by your rules we can continue adding suppositions until we get the result we want: after 6 hours of agonizing torture, including crushing the testicles of the suspected terrorist’s 6-year-old son in front of his eyes, the suspect breaks down and provides The Fool with the location of the nuclear device in New York City and the necessary disarming code. The Fool personally leads a team of trained commandos across New York City to the location of the bomb, killing several pedestrians in haste to get there. The Fool and his team smash into the device’s location through the side wall. As they charge into the room, guns and Geiger counters ready, they hear a loud recorded “bang”. At that instant Boston is vaporized by the terrorist’s real device.

I mean seriously, if anyone actually has such a device and is both stupid and utterly evil enough to use it they will bring it into the US in a shipping container, load it into a heavy-duty delivery van, drive it directly to the location where they want to detonate it, and then … detonate it. The idea that utterly evil, hardened, dedicated terrorists add ticking timers to their weapons and play “24” type fictional games is so ridiculous that it would be insulting to 2-year-olds to call it “childish”.

It also fails to address the growing evidence that Dick Cheney and his gang derived personal satisfaction and enjoyment from ordering torture – as torturers throughout history have eventually so derived. At first they tell themselves that it is “necessary” to “avoid ticking time bombs” that they make the “tough decisions”, but it always and everywhere rapidly degenerates into a sick personal (and possibly sexual) satisfaction.

Finally, if The Fool absolutely thinks that torture is necessary then the correct procedure is to (1) personally order and conduct the torture (2) Save New York from Terrorist Annihilation (3) turn himself in to the nearest police station, FBI office, or US Attorney’s office, waive his Miranda rights, waive his right to counsel, and make a full confession of his crime. Is that what Dick Cheney did? David Addington? John Yoo? Hmmm… back to that sexual satisfaction thing…

Cranky

To spin out a hypothetical scenario that would satisfy the condiditons: if we had a group of terrorists who had been under surveillance for some time and if we had bugged their quarters and had recorded daily conversations for the last month in which they planned in detail their nuclear terrorism plot, and if we had other evidence that they had acquired a nuclear device, and if some of those conversations included statements that the bomb was in place in New York City and if some of those conversations indicated which of them knew the location of the bomb and if we had gotten the names of which ones those were and if we then arrested one of the ones whom we knew to know the location, then we would have sufficient cause to use whatever force was necessary.

Granted, that’s a lot of conditions but any complicated scenario involves multiple conditions. The point is that such a scenario is logically possible and, while unlikely, it is not impossible to imagine it happening in the real world. The real world contains nuclear weapons. In the real world there has never been a weapon that has been kept out of the hands of the wicked forever. In the real world, plots have been thwarted by police work. You put those things together and you get the TTB in the real world.

P.S. Your argument about preemptive execution of murderers is inapt for at least two reasons. First, The TTB is not about somehow predicting a future crime, it is about thwarting a crime in progress. Second, the TTB is much more compelling than any case about a single murder because of the large number of lives at stake—potentially millions.

Completely and utterly irrelevant. The structure of the TTB is: our use of torture is justified because we know in advance with perfect certainty that it will prevent a greater evil. Exactly the same argument could be used to justify pre-emptively executing future terrorists, or for that matter pre-emptively imprisoning future murderers – if we had perfectly certain advance knowledge. In real life we never can have that kind of certainty, so we have to do what we can consistent with our own ignorance and the suspects’ rights. Hence, due process.

I said it is “logically possible”. Do you maintain that the concept of the TTB is self-contradictory?

Empirically speaking, it is an open question just how likely the TTB is. I have already agreed that it is unlikely. But over the next 50-100 years, as more and more countries like Iran and Iraq and North Korea develop nuclear weapons? With the rise and fall of nuclear regimes like Pakistan? Seems like a live possibility to me.

Are you unconcerned with whether or not the Russians secure their loose nukes? Do you find the money we spend on the program to encourage the Russians to secure those nukes to be a complete and total waste?

Who said that? Certainly not I. I despise torture. Bush faced nothing like the TTB and deserves to be tried for his many crimes, including war crimes that include torture.

I don’t see it. The scenario implies that you’re certain that there is a bomb, certain that the suspect knows how to disarm it and certain that he’ll talk under torture. In the real world we can’t read minds in this way – which is pretty much why we have due process.

Whilst those who violated the law, the Constitution, and 99.9% of the moral codes recognized by humanity, and enshrined torture and dictatorial government as the future path of the United States (*) whilst simultaneously making the United States LESS “safe” (whatever that means, but in this case by their own definition), did not harm their credibility at all. No SIR! And they must not be questioned or held to account for their actions. No, never: those who so question might be branded “extremists”. Unlike Dick Cheney that sensible centrist man.

Cranky

(*) There is no question in my mind that an Obama presidency is better than any of the alternatives. But knowing the South Side of Chicago as I do I was fairly certain from the start that Obama was a conservative, and that is proving out. A kinder, gentler conservative Democrat to be sure, but a conservative nonetheless. And one who firmly believes in the primacy of Presidential power. He will take actions around the edges to reduce the horror, but he will leave the structures intact for the next Republican president (the Cheney daughter?) in 2016.

I’ll leave aside the plausibility and the implications of the TTB for now, but as a matter of fact, in debating the TTB on several liberal blogs including Greenwald’s at Salon, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Yglesisas and Sadly, No, I have encountered many civil libertarians who explicitly claim to be willing to make just such a trade off. In fact, many of them are quite proud of it and see themselves as taking stand for morality in justice.

I think the TTB is both highly unlikely but possible. Yes, the circumstances have to be just so, but all the huffing and puffing aside, it isn’t really that hard to imagine a real world scenario that could lead to a situation that was relevantly similar.

Philosophically speaking, the TTB is certainly logically possible and stands as one of the strongest arguments against moral absolutist positions. Granted, most philosophers have more sense than to be a moral absolutist in a TTB kind of scenario but there are some nonetheless. What’s more, many deontological philosophers who do grudgingly allow that under certain circumstances they would allow torture in a TTB type scenario make appeals like Walzer to “dirty hands” or like Scanlon they throw their hands up in the air and say morality simply ceases to apply. But they do so at the cost of incoherence in their theories.

Practically speaking, dismissal of the TTB, as in the Belle Waring post that Henry links to, simply by ridiculing it may well be counterproductive from a public relations standpoint. Many people, myself included, CAN imagine a TTB scenario. We may not think it is very likely, but we don’t think it is utterly ridiculous. That’s why, for example, we think that it is wise for the U.S. to continue to fund the program that gives money to Russia to try to secure their loose nukes.

Now given, that there are a fair number of people who find the TTB plausible (if not probable!) then to simply dismiss the TTB as ridiculous carries the risk of backfiring on the anti-torture side. The risk is that they will be seen as ideologues who oppose the possibility of the TTB as a matter of faith. This will unnecessarily harm their credibility as a general matter. Given that we all think the TTB is improbable, it is much smarter to acknowledge that in the highly unlikely TTB scenario we might have to think the unthinkable, while pivoting and sharply distinguishing the TTB from any situation that currently holds, e.g. the situation that faced the Bush Administration.

An even worse strategy is to acknowledge the TTB and say that you would be willing to sacrifice millions of lives in order to preserve the rights of the terrorist. People here at Crooked Timber seem to think there are no such people, but in fact, as I say, there are. The worst thing that could happen to those of us on the anti-torture side is to branded as extremist pacifists. Then we will lose all credibility on these kinds of questions and there will be more torture rather than less.

Or, to put it a different way – since words are Mr. Crook’s tool of trade, I think we can grant that he is competent enough in using the English language to say what he actually meant to say. If he meant to say ‘this could be taken to imply that,’ he could actually have used the words ‘this could be taken to imply that.’ He didn’t, and instead used quite different words to make a quite different and extremely offensive claim. Nor has he sought in the interim to qualify or withdraw this claim.

To make such a statement without explicitly acknowledging that there is a competing hypothesis that there does not actually exist a “tradeoff” function between more lawbreaking/torture and more “security” is as far as I can see to make the assertion in your first paragraph.

(Similarly, not acknowledging that the definition of “security” is complex even within the current right-wing-framed colloquial meaning of that word, and more complex if one thinks through the full set of possible definitions {c.f. Schneier}, is also problematic).

Cranky

your clear and plain reading of his words has Clive saying something extremely stupid (civil libertarians would be happy to see hundreds of thousands die rather than slightly compromise). Do you think that:

a) he really does think that (he is a moron)
b) he thinks no such thing, but wrote very sloppily
c) he thinks no such thing, but purposely wrote a “disgusting and offensive slur” anyway (he’s a loathsome rat bastard)

me, I think d) he meant something else and his meaning is plain enough; I don’t think it takes much of a “tortuous effort” to see it. When I read him, I did not think “OMG! He’s saying that civil libertarians … etc.!! How disgusting!” because I didn’t think he’d say anything so daft, and there was a more generous interpretation readily available (he meant “the civil libertarian position would imply …. [and implicitly] because they are mistaken about the nature of the world and/or don’t see the implications of their own arguments”).

but hey ho, I could be wrong and maybe Mr Crook is the kind of shit you say he is – and if the true state of affairs is either a) or c) then I’m in wholehearted agreement with you. But maybe you’re guilty of an offensive suggestion of your own.