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The Myth of the Ticking Time Bomb

By Alexa

Can we finally, at long last, put this bit of sensationalized fiction to rest?

James Richardson at the Great Orange Satan wrote in Talk To Me About Torture:

I must admit I don't share the level of outrage the rest of my peers do over the numerous revelations of torture.  Quite the contrary; I assumed we had been torturing at least some of the prisoners before it was ever reported.  

What if there weren't a million people at risk though?  What if it were a group of soldiers in Iraq?  What if there were going to be attacked tomorrow and the prisoner they captured knew the details but would not talk?  Would we let them die so we could say we don't torture?  How many lives have to be at risk before we are willing to torture?

Spoken like a true winger and fan of Jack Bauer and 24. Pay no mind to that noise. My head explodes at least once a day 'bout this time.

It's not enough nowadays to kick back, watch some tube, chill. You have to think about it and reconcile whether or not you believe the president and his cryptic, blood-curdling rhetoric of "Person X has learned the hard way that Americans love freedom." I resent that, incidentally. I resent the smirk and the cowboy on crack attitude. When my daughter and I watch the idiot box (Nickelodeon for her), we do not wish to see El Jefe Idiota because let's face it, if his lips are moving, he's lying.

So what of this 24 nonsense? The hero who uses "humint, sigint and finint" (give my cafe au lait ass a break with the psyops lingo, teevee peeps.) Heroic Jack Bauer has a suspect. You know as well as I do there are no innocents in Jack Bauer's World - and no one cooperates there, either. Whatcha gonna do? He must be tortured, dammit! Things will be the way the people want them to be!

Number one: In the real world, the probability that a terrorist might be captured after concealing a ticking nuclear bomb in Times Square and that his captors would somehow recognize his significance is phenomenally slender. The scenario assumes a highly improbable array of variables that runs something like this:

-First, FBI or CIA agents apprehend a terrorist at the precise moment between timer's first tick and bomb's burst.

-Second, the interrogators somehow have sufficiently detailed foreknowledge of the plot to know they must interrogate this very person and do it right now.

-Third, these same officers, for some unexplained reason, are missing just a few critical details that only this captive can divulge.

-Fourth, the biggest leap of all, these officers with just one shot to get the information that only this captive can divulge are best advised to try torture, as if beating him is the way to assure his wholehearted cooperation.

Sounds like Zacarias Moussaoui, no? The so-called "twentieth hijacker." Oops, silly me. That was Khalid Sheik Mohammad. Or no -- actually, it was Mohammad al-Kahtani. Or was it Abu Zubaydah? Does anyone happen to know how many twentieth hijackers there were?

You can't eat -- err, torture, just one.
Once we agree to torture the one terrorist with his hypothetical ticking bomb, then we admit a possibility, even an imperative, for torturing hundreds who might have ticking bombs or thousands who just might have some knowledge about those bombs. "You can't know whether a person knows where the bomb is," explains Georgetown University Law Professor David Cole, "or even if they're telling the truth. Because of this, you end up going down a slippery slope and sanctioning torture in general."

Most of those rounded up by military sweeps in Iraq and Afghanistan for imprisonment at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo had nothing to do with terrorism. A recent analysis of the Pentagon listing of Guantánamo's 517 detainees reveals that 86 percent were arrested not by U.S. forces but by Northern Alliance and Pakistani warlords eager to collect a $5,000 bounty for every "terrorist" captured.

Psychologist and historian Alfred McCoy says:

The use of torture to stop ticking bombs leads ultimately to a cruel choice-either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, a la Vietnam.

And this seems simple enough to me.

Khalid Sheik Mohammad (who did have information on 9/11 but not any "ticking time bomb" fiction) was tortured horrifically, beaten, waterboarded, interrogated 20 hours out of 24 for weeks.

But the CIA thought he wasn't telling them everything he knew. And so they threatened to kill his children, ages 3 and 6 at the time. (The children and KSM's wife also detained.) They said to him: Tell us or your children are going to suffer.

And KSM said fine, let them go to Allah -- they will not suffer any more.

Once you cross a line like that, there's no going back. Do you think KSM would ever cooperate again?

Another consideration is the Geneva Conventions, which the US no longer honors. When we don't observe ICC or GC, what happens when our own soldiers are taken prisoner?

Things like the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq - dead, tortured bodies of two US servicemen.

And finally, the heartbreaking true story of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was kidnapped (renditioned) while vacationing with his family and imprisoned in a tiny cell he vividly describes as a grave in Syria. What happened to Maher Arar in that "grave?"

The next day I was taken upstairs again. The beating started that day and was very intense for a week, and then less intense for another week. That second and the third days were the worst.

I could hear other prisoners being tortured, and screaming and screaming. Interrogations are carried out in different rooms.

One tactic they use is to question prisoners for two hours, and then put them in a waiting room, so they can hear the others screaming, and then bring them back to continue the interrogation.

The cable is a black electrical cable, about two inches thick. They hit me with it everywhere on my body.

Maher Arar was eventually released, but why was he ever detained? Because a victim of torture in the so-called war on terror screamed his name (and names of everyone he could remember) in a desperate effort to make the guards stop torturing him. They demanded answers. The suspect had no answers but would say anything (and did) to make them stop.

Maher Arar was completely innocent of any wrongdoing, but he was renditioned, tortured and jailed in a "grave" because someone else was desperate to tell his interrogators anything he could think of just to make the pain stop.

24 is agitprops, and it's popular because so many people want to believe, are desperate to believe, that Americans don't torture and if we do, well, it must surely be for a good reason, and it's kept us safe since 9/11. Dios mio, did you sleep through Hurricane Katrina? Didn't that dispel the "keep us safe" mythology?

Or maybe it's as simple as some people like to watch.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).