Tick, Tick, Bull, Shit

Dont believe the CIAs ticking time bomb excuse when it says it had to torture.

Tic
k, tick, tick. You know that sound? Its the sound of a thousand irrelevant hypotheticals.
BY ROSA BROOKS-DECEMBER 10, 2014

Most of them go something like this: Theres a nuclear bomb hidden

somewhere in New York City. If its detonated, millions will die! And you, a heroic public
servant an honorable career employee of the CIA, perhaps have captured the evil terrorist
mastermind who planted the bomb! Nice work!
He was standing right over the bomb, sneering his sinister, self-satisfied sneer, but you caught
him red-handed. Now youve got him subdued and cuffed. Better still, its not too late. The evil
terrorist mastermind knows the code to disarm the nuclear bomb. If you can just get that crucial
information from him in the next 60 minutes, you can disable the nuke and save the lives of
millions including your own family!
Tick, tick, tick.
So, you ask him nicely: Evil Terrorist Mastermind, kindly tell me how to disable this nuclear

bomb so I can save the lives of millions.

It doesnt work. The evil terrorist mastermind cackles his terrible cackle and says, Never!
Never will I reveal the code needed to disarm this bomb! We will all die here together!
You try again. You appeal to his humanity. To his fear of death. You promise immunity. You
offer him money. You beg. You threaten him with pain and humiliation. Nothing works. He just
keeps on cackling his terrible cackle and sneering his sinister sneer.
Tick, tick.
Finally, you do what you have to do. You take out your gun, your electric drill, and your
portable waterboarding kit. You fire a shot in the air. You buzz the drill next to his ear, and
you waterboard him until hes gasping and choking.
Tell me! Tell me how to disarm the bomb, and your agony will end! you order.
He clamps his mouth shut. Never!

Tick, tick.
Seizing his lunchbox, you quickly puree his hummus and pasta wrap in your portable blender,
and feed it to him rectally using your portable rectal feeding apparatus. Its a terrible thing
youre doing, and you know it, but you have no choice! You must save New York! You must
save your family!
And finally, the evil terrorist mastermind cracks. Finally. Gone is his sinister sneer, replaced by
a look of terror and shame. Stop! Stop! he sobs, Please, I beg you, stop! Ill tell you how to
disarm the bomb! Just enter the letters C-I-A into the bombs control panel!
Tick, tick.
There are only seconds left!
Tick, tick.
Gasping, you race to the bombs control panel and careful, you have only one chance to get
this right you type in those three magic letters: C-I-A. And you pray. A pause. The Earth
seems to halt momentarily in its orbit. Then DETONATION ABORTED.
Thank God! You did it. You saved New York, and a grateful nation totallyforgives you for the
whole waterboarding thing. As for the rectal feeding, well, that was icky, but when youre
fighting terrorism, shit happens. Alls well that ends well.
The ticking bomb scenario is a powerful hypothetical, and its one that several former CIA
directors really, really hope youll keep in mind this week to counterbalance all those not-so-

nice revelations contained in the just-released Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI)
report on CIA interrogations.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, and
Michael Hayden and three former CIA deputy directors insist that all that waterboarding and
rectal feeding wasnt pointless: It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives [and] the
disruption of terrorist attacks [and] added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as
an organization.
Besides, they say, the SSCI report leaves out the all-important context which is that
everything the ACLU insists on calling torture happened way back when things were really
scary: We had evidence that al Qaeda was planning a second wave of attacks on the U.S.
[and that] bin Laden had met with Pakistani nuclear scientists and wanted nuclear weapons. We
had reports that nuclear weapons were being smuggled into New York City [and] evidence
that al Qaeda was trying to manufacture anthrax. It felt like the classic ticking time bomb
scenario every single day.
Tick, tick!
No doubt it did feel that way. But theres one major problem with the ticking bomb scenario:
Its entirely irrelevant morally and legally.
First, in real life you dont get actual ticking bomb scenarios, with their certainty, simplicity,
and urgency.In real life, you get ambiguity and uncertainty. You get conflicting information
about the nature, magnitude, and timing of threats, and conflicting information about the
identity of planners and perpetrators. Sometimes, you get information thats just plain wrong:
As the SSCI report notes, more than two dozen people tortured by the CIA were detained in
error. In some cases, they were victims of simple cases of mistaken identity.
This creates an obvious slippery slope risk: If we think torture is justifiable in the hypothetical I
used above, would torture be justifiable if the bomb wasnt a nuclear bomb? What if it was only
powerful enough to kill 100 people, not millions? Ten people? One person? Would torture be
justifiable if we thought the person we captured might be about to set off a bomb that might kill
10 people? What if we werent sure we had captured the right guy? Would it be okay to torture
someone who might be innocent because torture might produce information that might save
100 people? Ten? One?
The publicly available portions of the SSCI report run to hundreds of pages, but for the most
part, the CIAs use of torture occurred in situations of extreme uncertainty, not in true ticking
bomb scenarios.
Second, the insistence that torture works just leads to more slippery slopes.
For now, lets set aside the many arguments that torture doesnt work that it
produces unreliable information, or that it produces no information that couldnt be obtained
just as effectively without torture. Lets assume, for the sake of the argument, that torturing a

suspect really does produce reliable information. Assume, as a new website sponsored by more
former CIA officials insists, that the CIAs use of torture saved lives.
So what? I can think of lots of ways to save American lives that most of us would consider
completely unacceptable, particularly in situations of ambiguity. If waterboarding a suspected
terrorist might produce valuable information and save lives, why draw the line at
waterboarding? Why not pull out a suspects fingernails with a pair of pliers? Why not sexually
assault the suspect, or start chopping off limbs?
For that matter, if efficacy is all that matters, why draw the line at suspected terrorists? Why not
torture, rape, or kill the suspects wife, mother, and children in front of him? That might be
effective, too.
Why stop there? Why not take a leaf out of the Old Testament, and slaughter the first-born sons
of every extremist we can find? Or just commit genocide to eliminate the populations that seem
to produce the most terrorists?
Once we start justifying immoral actions based on their utilitarian outcomes, theres no
principled place to stop. And unless we want a nation of vigilantes unless we want a moral
free-for-all, in which everyone decides for him or herself whether and when its appropriate to
use torture or worse we need to maintain an absolute legal prohibition on torture.
Theres a third and final reason to reject the ticking time bomb hypothetical as irrelevant: It
doesnt tell us anything we dont already know.
As Ive written elsewhere, constructing hypotheticals in which most of us would agree that
wed use torture is childs play. I think of myself as a pretty nice person, but Id unquestionably
use torture if I were the protagonist in the ticking bomb scenario. It wouldnt even take a nuke
under New York City to turn me into a waterboarder. If my children were threatened, Id turn to
torture in a heartbeat if I thought that would protect them. Readers, I imagine youd be no
different.
But this doesnt change the moral status of torture. All this tells us is that under sufficient
psychological pressure, virtually all of us would commit immoral acts. In fact, the lesson of the
ticking bomb hypothetical is fundamentally the same as the lesson of torture itself: There are
some pressures whether physical or psychological that are too terrible for most humans
to withstand.
Waterboard someone, deprive him of sleep for a week, chain him to the ceiling for days so he
cant sit or lie down, lock him naked in a freezing cell hell crack in the end. Hell crack,
and do whatever it takes to bring an end to the pressure. Hell betray his ideology; hell betray
his own secrets; hell betray his comrades.
Or, put an ordinary human being into a situation in which everything he holds dear is
threatened. New York will be destroyed; America will be destroyed; his family will die in
agony unless he cracks, and resorts to interrogation techniques he considers immoral. To put

an end to the agonizing psychological pressure, hell betray his own deepest moral instincts.
Ironically, the imagined protagonist in the ticking bomb scenario is in a position structurally
parallel to that of the captured terror suspect, and to ask whether his use of torture was
justified or the lesser evil in such a hypothetical misses the point.Under enough physical or
psychological pressure, almost all of us would do any number of terrible things: Wed steal,
kill, reveal secrets, betray our comrades or torture.
But this truth about human psychology tells us nothing about law or morality. We dont prohibit
stealing, killing, treason, and torture because we believe no decent person would ever
commit such acts; we prohibit them because theyre wrong, and we want such acts to occur as
infrequently as possible.
Youll be hearing a lot this week from those responsible for authorizing torture after 9/11
from former CIA directors such as Tenet and Goss, and from elected leaders such as former
Vice President Dick Cheney and former President George W. Bush. Theyll all be saying the
same thing: Torture saves lives; it was legal when we did it; and it should stay legal.
Tick, tick, tick.
But if we dont want America to be a nation that slides right down the slippery slope, we should
resist all calls to excuse or legalize torture. Sen. John McCain has it right: The question of
torture isnt about our enemies; its about us. Its about who we were, who we are, and who we
aspire to be.
That ticking sound? Its a false alarm, intended to induce panic and overwhelm logic.
Ignore it.
Image: Martin Barraud/Getty Images; Photoillustration by FP
Posted by Thavam