That is the question Matthew Yglesias poses, now that advocates for torture are promoting its use for routine intelligence-gathering as opposed to the original rationale that torture should be limited to the mythical “ticking time bomb” scenario (emphasis is mine):
Predictably enough, I disagree [with the 58% of Americans who approve of torture]. But agree or disagree, what I really wanted to draw attention to was how different this discussion is from the debater’s gambit arguments we’re used to having about ticking time bombs and city-destroying nuclear weapons. The fact that Abdulmuttalab was on that plane, alone, with a not-very-impressive explosive stuffed down his pants is about the best proof you can think of that al-Qaeda doesn’t have a massive nuclear weapon hidden somewhere beneath Manhattan that they’re about to set off. The guy may or may not have some information that would be useful to intelligence officials, but he clearly doesn’t have specific information about imminent attacks. The idea being endorsed here is really just routinized use of torture as an investigatory technique.
At any rate, I would be interested to know how far the public—or how torture-loving conservative elites—would be willing to go on this. In a lot of ways terrorism cases strike me as unusually unpromising venues for torture. Something more banal like trying to get a low-level drug dealer to spill the beans on his supplier could really work. My view is that routinized deployment of brutality by government officials isn’t going to produce any systematic gains, so it doesn’t make sense to uncork this kind of treatment on Abdulmuttalab or Generic Drug Dealer X. But for torture enthusiasts is there anything special about terrorism suspects?
Of course, there is. They are stand-ins for the 9/11 hijackers who permanently removed our sense of ourselves as a nation that acted on the world but could not be acted on by the world. Those 9/11 hijackers reversed the natural global order: They acted on us but denied us the chance to act on them for what they had done. They snatched our revenge and shattered it by choosing to die in the act of killing. Every person with a Middle Eastern name since that time whom we suspected of having committed acts of terrorism, or of associating with terrorists, or with having knowledge of terrorist activities — whether or not they actually had the slightest connection to terrorists or terrorism — became that stolen opportunity for revenge.That’s why we don’t torture drug dealers or serial killers or bank robbers. We may be horrified at their deeds, but we do not desire revenge.
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