Reply #31: Even my quite liberal mom says she can "understand" the ticking-bomb logic [View All]

[Leopolds Ghost]

But the problem with the ticking bomb theory is simple:

** If we know enough to know something so destructive is about to happen, then we know enough to stop it.

** One captured terrorist is not going to have the information about exactly what an on-the-ground assassin or "soldier" is doing. This is like torturing a captured Russian spy in order to get the nuclear codes to stop Russia from bombing the US. Not gonna happen.

** If he did and we were that close to disaster, torture is unlikely to produce accurate information prior to the bomb going off (or the plane crashing into the George Washington Bridge and other targets in Manhattan, as the Blind Sheikh famously claimed it would in the media
at the close of Fitzgerald's blockbuster New York investigation. Of coursem some of those quotes have mysteriously been scrubbed from search engines, so not everyone remembers the George Washington Bridge business...) Why give away the game when you can lead investigators on a wild goose chase like in "Die Hard 3"??

** If the terrorist is willing to give away the game because he's insufficiently zealous or getting cold feet, then torture is not the most efficacious way of getting him to confess in a short period of time.

** Again, WHY do we know this stuff (planes gonna crash into WTC, just like the terrorists said they would to reporters in 1999 and 2000 -- ticking bomb gonna go off) and not able to DO anything about it unless exact information is known from exactly one person? Or are we talking about torturing everyone who might potentially be "the one" -- a figure undoubtedly masquerading as a harmless muslim?? Is that what we are condoning here??

Remember, in POLICE work, you take a harmless muslim, find EVIDENCE that an attack is going to take place, thwart the attack on the basis of physical EVIDENCE and TIPS from witnesses and accomplices who are WILLING to talk, and THEN get the "harmless muslim" to confess by showing him you got the evidence to prove he wasn't so harmless. Whereupon they gladly do confess, as with Moussaoui.