Editorial: Torture in the real world

Hard cases make bad law, the saying goes, to which we'd add a corollary: Flawed hypotheticals make bad policy.

The current example of this is the Jack Bauer scenario, after the character in "24" who each season saves the nation from terrorist threats by breaking most of the policies in the law-enforcement rulebook. That includes interrogation techniques - sanitized for TV, lest Bauer appear more villain than hero - that might in some handbooks be classified as torture.

The Bauer Hypothetical runs something like this: What if you had a prisoner who knew the location of a nuclear device set to explode at any moment and the only way you could find it is by torturing the prisoner. Would you do it?

No less an authority than former President Bill Clinton recently accepted the hypothesis and answered in the affirmative, though he moderated his position after Hillary Clinton took a different tack. Other candidates have also been forced to dance their way through an answer to the hypothetical.

The problem is that the proposition is incomplete. In the real world, if the president legalizes torture as an investigative tool, it won't be reserved for the moment when global disaster is imminent. In the real world, as those who have used torture and been victims of it attest, a tortured victim will eventually provide an answer, but rarely will it be an accurate one.

A reality-based hypothetical would have to read more like this:

What if you had a prisoner you thought might know where a nuclear device was hidden?

What if innocent people, and less-than-innocent people who knew no vital secrets, had to be routinely tortured before you got to the villain who knew about the bomb?

What if major U.S. interests - especially its reputation abroad as a nation that follows treaties, respects laws and treats foreigners humanely - were compromised by countenancing torture?

What if you knew the torture would provide more false information than useful information? What if you knew, in short, that your desperation tactic would not succeed?

Then would you, as president, approve the torture of prisoners?

Lesson one for those who would lead the nation is don't answer hypotheticals that misrepresent reality. Lesson two is don't make real world policies based on understanding gleaned from TV action dramas.

MetroWest