If you don’t like hypotheticals, why the frick are you in this thread?
Here’s the sitch. You and a beloved companion–significant other, child eigne, bosom friend, whatever–are travelling in the Middle East. Due to an utterly contrived set of circumstances, you get arrested by Iranian security forces and thrown in the clink, charged with espionage, blasphemy, counter-revolutionary activities, and having the wrong color hair. That’s a singular “you,” by the way; your beloved travelling companion is NOT with you when you get nabbed. From the safety of a hotel on the right side of the border, your BTC calls Rhymer Enterprises and gets by Bernadette from Big Bang Theory (who technically works in our bio-weapons department but is covering the Help Desk for a friend), and has the following conversation:
What’s the answer to that question? What decision do you want your travelling companion to make? For that matter, does your choice change if you’re the one talking to Bernadette and your BTC is in the Iranian prison awaiting their gentle interrogation techniques?
I don’t understand why that matters; can you explain?
Anyway, to extend the hypo per request, let’s say your story was not unlike that of these three American hikers; if you were inside Iranian borders when arrested, it was either accidental or because you were tricked into crossing. Except that I’m not willing to guarantee there’s no torture. Because, you know, Iran.
It’s totally hypothetical, since I can’t travel in the Middle East (one country won’t let me in and I don’t care about the others), but I know too many Iranian students to want the random slaughter of guards and prisoners, and I’ve never viewed the country as “The Enemy.” Tell Kerry, Clinton or Rodman to hop on a jet to Tehran. I’ll hold.
If that doesn’t work in a few weeks, then she can cash in the rescue chit.
If I’m inside Iran or near it’s borders than I’m an idiot and likely to have the selfish opinion that any number of people should die to effect my release.
If I was kidnapped from someplace where it’s reasonable to expect rational rule of law to apply then I’d expect my predicament has great impact on many more people and I’d want no more or less death than necessary to protect the public good, which hopefully includes my own good.
Seriously? You think I’d give a rat’s ass about redshirts holding me prisoner in some hell hole where they do not serve grits or sweet tea, much less the blessed nectar that is bourbon?
Fuck em. Send the team. I don’t care if they turn the entire country into a radioactive wasteland. Just get me out in time for the NFL draft.
What is your plan? Because I imagine Bernadette’s is something like this:
Teleport Extraction Team to vicinity of prison.
Knock hole in fence surrounding prison. Have dragon-rider fly around setting shit on fire in service of generating terror while Powered Armor Guy and the two Terminators enter, one mimicking BTC and not actively engaging in combat.
PAG & Terminators go from cell to cell, looking for DoperName. Ignore anybody who doesn’t offer resistance. Shoot/repulsor blast/punch hole in head of anyone who offers resistance, unless they resemble DoperName, in which case they are not to be harmed to avoid accidents.
As soon as DoperName is located, send in Terminator mimicking BTC and reassure DoperName that she or he is not in danger so DoperName comes along without panicking.
Once DoperName has been secured, PAG sends signal to whoever relieved Bernadette, and relief teleports PAG, Terminators, and DoperName to secure location.
Dragon-rider and dragon do whatever the fuck they feel like doing till they’re ready to come home. That’s what “dragon” means, and given that Bernadette gene-engineered it, we can take as a given that it’s invulnerable to anything short of a cruise missile.
You misspelled “scotch.” Bourbon is for Kentuckians.
You couldn’t imagine any good reason to going to or near Iran–working with a relief agency or whatnot?
I make it a policy to never approach the borders of unfriendly nations with a history of imprisoning dumbasses on vacation (like me). Especially unmarked/disputed borders like those hikers may or may not have crossed.
Nevertheless, to engage the hypothetical:
We are more important than you. Where “we” = “the dozen or so people in my modern day tribe equivalent” and “you” = “everybody else in the world”. So, kill them all.
If mowing down a couple dozen guards who have already shit their pants and surrendered would spare me 10 seconds of electrical current to the gonads, feel free to do that. Would incinerating a small crowd on the street outside result in one less fingernail being torn out? I’m cool with it. Could we avoid the waterboarding entirely by preemptively crushing somebody’s family under a pile of bottlenose dolphin carcasses? You’re the experts, I won’t tell you how to do your job.
Now, I’m not advocating needless violence, just do what it takes to get it done as quickly as possible. Of course, if needless violence motivates your merry band of murderers to work faster, have at it, friends.
Nope. Doing that would be a danger to the public at large who are too stupid to figure out I shouldn’t have been there in the first place and may try to get me out. No rational person has any business being there unless they are willing to risk their own lives and not the lives of others.
It’s not as if I requested to be rescued and if they are going to free me from what would likely be years of torture and deprivation, I would simply get rescued and worry about what it took to break me out later.
As I said before, I’d expect it to be treated as an international crime that anyone could be a victim of, and a response measured on that basis. If reasonable negotiations fail to at least make it unlikely for anyone else to be victimized in that way. The possibility exists that lots of Iranians are killed, and hopefully no one else. I’m willing to rot there to prevent unnecessary deaths of non-Iranians, or indiscriminate deaths of Iranians who have no part in my abduction, but I really wouldn’t have any control over it. The really tough call will be whether or not to kill myself because many would believe I was killed by the Iranians and it make precipitate even more death and destruction. I’d certainly prefer death to sitting in an Iranian prison cell for what could easily be the rest of my life, and the associated beatings and torture that would occur from my inability to keep my mouth shut if nothing else.
On the other hand–lots of those prisoners are likely to escape in the chaos, aren’t they? How likely is it that the dragon will eat ALL of them, or even most (even given that it’s likely that Bernadette herself is riding it)?
They are there to guard prisoners put there by the state, and are not told which ones deserve to be there and which one were railroaded. Killing them for keeping me imprisoned is no more right then killing them for keeping murderers and rapists jailed.
I’ll probably start a thread manana looking for votes on what Saturday’s dinner should be. Be patient.
ETA: I doubt the PAG will listen to that admonition, as he’s a sociopath. Likewise the Terminators. But since they’re only offing killing people who offer resistance rather than running away screaming, the prisoners should be safe unless the guards try to use them as a human shield, and that will probably only happen once or twice once it’s demonstrated that it doesn’t work. Isn’t the prisoner’s death in such a circumstance the guards’ fault, not yours?
I voted for “kill guards only, not prisoners,” but my moral soul says I should have voted for “there must be a way to reduce the casualties.”
My hard-edged reasoning is that the guards are agents of the state, and thus partake of a measure of the collective guilt for the state’s crimes. The prisoners might very well be political prisoners – just like we are in this scenario!
Does a Golden Rule approach help? What if someone staged a violent rescue to release the prisoner in the cell next to yours, and you got killed in the resulting fighting: would you (abstractly) hold this to be acceptable?
(There actually is a WWII analogy to that: a French citizen, dying in the rubble of a house, wrote a final note, forgiving the Allies for the bombardment that killed him, because it was in support of the goal of freeing France. He accepted that his own death was a valid price to pay for his country’s freedom.)
Um, yeah, just bust me out please, I will take care of my guilt later.
