All 3 scenarios, “I’d personally break out the thumbscrews and harsh methods right away.”
These scenarios aren’t real and don’t happen. But if they did, I wouldn’t hesitate. Of course it would be part of a more complex good cop/bad cop setup, but I’d prefer to be the bad cop.
In each of these cases you present some kind of assurance that the suspect has actual information that could be revealed. But only an idiot says “I know where the bomb is and I won’t tell you” because he is inviting torture. Now if you have nothing but suspicion, you can’t use torture, because that would make you evil. But if I do know someone has information that would save lives and might be revealed by torture, I have no reason to hesitate.
For the record, I’ll use whatever works, or has a chance of working, on the prisoner to get the information out of him. Whether that involves talking to him nicely, or pulling out his fingernails, or giving him a grasshopper, or strapping electromagnets to his skull so he sees the Slender Man coming for him, or cutting him a check. But the fact as it stands is, I’ve got a prisoner who apparently knows where a huge bomb is going to enter the country, which will kill huge amounts of people when it goes off, and he won’t talk. Matters aren’t getting much worse than that.
Well hey, if we’re making assumptions, we can make the OP scenario all sorts of things! Now he’s a oligofascist, who IS guilty of something, but torture won’t work—oh! Now he’s a Jain ascetic, who doesn’t know anything, but torture would work quickly and efficiently if he was!
And the OP specified that this was a question about torturing someone who’s plotting the greatest single act of mass murder in history, not “would you torture a prisoner who knows where a ballbearing factory is” or something similarly non-friggin’-extenuating.
Yeah, and maybe it would damage the reputation and effectiveness of my intelligence agency and my public image if it got out that the prisoner got the fourth degree, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would in most circumstances, but I’d generally get the same blind eye turned towards this guy as the reprisal killings of SS death camp guards got. Maybe it would have bad effects, but they’d be less-bad in the long run than a successful nuclear terrorist attack and* it’s* aftermath. Or maybe it WOULD have bad socio-political-military consequences—if the prisoner, once he’d been wrung dry, hadn’t simply…disappeared. No official records, and certainly no public confirmation that he’d ever even been captured. Just whispers and ashes. :eek:
The hypothetical situation of a literal ticking bomb, and a suspect who admits they planted it and could tell you where it is, but refuses to do so, is fairly extreme. It’s like saying “if civilisation collapses, would you steal food from someone else’s children to feed your children?” Many people would. Some people would refuse. Almost everyone doesn’t know how they would actually react until they’re in that situation.
The point of civilisation is to try to AVOID getting into those situations where you have to chose between bad thing A and bad thing B.
The problem with torture isn’t that in the hypothetical situation that everything shown in 24 actually happens, it’s definitely wrong.
The problem is that massively, massively often, people will claim ticking-bomb level urgency when it’s not there because they want to think they’re Jack Bauer, and will end up torturing someone completely innocent because they didn’t have any due process. <b>Even talking about it on a message board is a very bad thing, because it makes it seem more ‘normal’ so it’s more likely someone will think it’s justified, even though it’s not.</b>
In the specific ticking bomb scenario, where you’re sure the guy is guilty, and it’s easy to quickly check the answers he gives, it can work, but interrogators aren’t usually incentivised to find TRUE answers, they’re incentivised to find answers that GIVE MORE PRESTIGIOUS WORK FOR INTERROGATORS, and torture works equally well for both.
I have long maintained there has never been a real scenario where a ticking bomb (or something of that ilk) was found by torture. I have further said, with less certainty, that I cannot think of a case where a prisoner had such very important time-sensitive information and the captor knew he had it.
