My favorite hypothetical is one in which we've caught a torture apologist, and we know that torturing him will prevent the torture of millions of others. . . can we afford the moral vanity of not getting out the blowtorch, the car battery and the waterboard?

Hell, it's too deep a question to ponder beyond exclaiming exhuberantly and in 5/4 time, "the birds in the trees sing high, sing low, was that a rape ab initio"?

Just to be on the safe side we should pre-emptively rape our own children. If we don't rape our own children, the terrorists have won.

Is that actually in 5/4? I can't make it work...

I am reminded of a description I once read of the bodies of people who died as a result of a ship that sank. Bruises and abrasions were found on the shoulders and heads, a result of people climbing over other people in their panic to save their own lives.

This is the state of panic that George Bush wants us to understand, as he himself does, and to accept as a normal reality as does Hillary Clinton who describes it as a question of severity. By describing torture as a matter of severity we may absolve ourselves of any kind of moral muddiness.

Hillary Clinton is a hypocrite and is obviously setting up the tenor of her election campaign in 2008 where she must prove that she is tougher on national security than her opponent. First she leads everyone to believe that she is against torture but now we find out that she would allow torture and even has the same propensity to redefine words as Bush so that no one will really know what she is saying as in torture equals severity.

I guess Hillary is looking at the voters and she knows that a large chunk of them fully support torture so it would seem that she is just a reflection of the people that make up this country and thanks to these violent, ignorant, overweight, belching, self centered people we shall probably be left with a choice between a republican and a republican disguised as a democrat.

You damned Frenchies are always looking to spoil perfectly good liberty scenarios.

The fact of the matter is we have caught dozens and dozens of terrorists in exactly those situations and thank goodness for loyal Americans who are willing to have their children raped. We'd all be dead by now but for them.

I'm going back to reading General J.C. Christian's web log. At least he's a good, loyal American. And a heterosexual.

I love your dig at Alan Dershowitz in the final paragraph. I see he is still defending his stupid "torture warrants" proposal, adding some whining about Bill Clinton to the good old ticking-time bomb scenario:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-dershowitz17oct17,0,7881821.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

Would this even count as "rape"? On the one hand, children are statutorially defined to be unable to grant consent in sexual matters. On the other hand, parents routinely give or withold consent on behalf of their children (permission slips, etc.). If it is determined that a parent can give consent for his child to have sex -- and the provisions for underage marriage seem to imply that -- then this wouldn't technically be rape. The terrorist, likely unacquainted with the nuances of our legal system, would believe that it was a real rape, and so everyone wins -- the bomb is defused, the terrorist fulfills his perverse desires, and the child isn't technically raped at all, but instead has a fully consensual sexual encounter with the terrorist.

Thus, the parent could presumably do this with a completely clean conscience, since he legally would not be handing his child over to a rapist.

I love the ticking time bomb scenerio. it's underlying assumption is that our inteligance gathering capabilities are so fucked that there's a terrorist cell with the connections and know how required to steal or build an Atomic bomb and that they've been operating here in the US, under our noses for monthes if not years and we didn't find out until the day they are detonating the bomb. If tat's the case, we are well and truley screwed.

I'm pretty sure that hypothetical situation was the plot of a "24" episode.

what if the FBI interrogates a suspect who admits he knew a guy that used to work for a bowling-ball manufacturer who figured out a way to make a bowling-ball that would detonate after being used to bowl a perfect 300 game? The guy installed the device, including the incredibly sophisticated servo devices that allowed the ball to measure its enviroment and see what the score was, inside a fairly cheap model of bowling ball, one generally purchased by bowling alleys to be used as rentals?

That ball is presumably out there, somewhere.

What should we do?

Have you ever been tortured? I have.

These hypotheticals pushing you into a position of justifying torture really piss me off.

The trouble with all these hypotheticals is they're premised on impossible assumptions such as, "You're sure of this and you're sure of that, etc."

As for this instance of doing a deal with a psychopathic pervert, you would have to be unbelievably stupid. You would be relying on him to fulfill his side of the bargain AFTER you had filled your side.

Hello-oh!

This hypothetical is also premised on you dealing with an honourable psychopath/pervert. Is anyone going to tell me they KNOW at least one exsts out there and this is your lucky day because here he is???!!!

Wasn't something very similar to this in The Brothers Karamazov, only in a completely serious and dramatic fashion?

Saurab, I'm sorry, just saw your question. The inapposite time of 5/4 was the point. I may have outdumbed my very own self. Sorry.

I think the obvious underlying absurdity is a prosecutor willing to press charges against a Federal agent for torturing a suspect in such a scenario. You can commit all kinds of crimes in this country and be caught and admit everything you did but as long as there's no prosecution and conviction there's no crime. This, generally, back when we lived on Earth, was how these things were resolved. If I know this then they know this and the only reason to have statutory immunity for this sort of behavior is if you want to systematize it; if you know you are going to be torturing people who are innocent or of no intelligence value because you are torturing vast swathes of people while fishing for reasons to keep holding some people in detention and others in a perpetual state of fear because you have no credible human intelligence service in spite of the fact that you now advertise it on 'The Simpsons.'

And I want to save Manhattan why?

There might be ten honest men in Manhattan.