Immediately after 9/11, the hand-wringing began. From Harvard Law School's Alan Dershowitz to Newsweek's Jonathan Alter to Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), influential commentators began to ask whether the United States should consider tougher interrogation techniques -- maybe even torture -- for suspected terrorists.
Variations on the same thought experiment were evoked by all: Imagine that a terrorist has hidden a powerful nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, scheduled to detonate in a few hours. He has been captured, but sneeringly refuses to reveal the whereabouts of the bomb. Wouldn't it be justifiable to torture this one man to make him reveal the bomb's location -- so that millions of people could be saved?
In this imaginary scenario, the interrogator is no sadistic thug -- far from it. He's a patriot and a hero who turns to torture only with vast reluctance, and only for the greater good.
The so-called ticking-bomb scenario has proved remarkably effective as a rhetorical tactic for defusing opposition to controversial interrogation techniques. Once you've admitted you would turn to torture in some circumstances, how can you object to merely "coercive" techniques -- such as sleep deprivation -- if they might get detainees to cough up something of intelligence value? A few proponents of the scenario even urge the legalization of torture in extreme cases.
But four years later, it turns out our collective willingness to take the ticking-bomb scenario seriously has given us no useful insight into the ethics of the war on terror. Instead, it has helped pave the way for the abuses that continue to be uncovered at interrogation sites from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.
Ticking-bomb scenarios are dangerously misleading. First, they begin by assuming the guilt of the suspect. In real life, we rarely have such certainty: More often, as we've seen since 2001, U.S. interrogators hold a number of detainees, some probably guilty of something (though not always what we think), others probably innocent. The cold utilitarian logic of the scenario suggests we might have to torture the guilty and innocent alike, if we believe that only torture will reveal which detainees actually possessed information that would avert a catastrophe.
