Why The Ticking Time Bomb Scenario Is Crap

Via Andrew Sullivan, John Yoo in the Montreal Gazzette (link is dead):
"Death is worse than torture, but everyone except pacifists thinks there are circumstances in which war is justified. War means killing people. If we are entitled to kill people, we must be entitled to injure them. I don't see how it can be reasonable to have an absolute prohibition on torture when you don't have an absolute prohibition on killing. Reasonable people will disagree about when torture is justified. But that, in some circumstances, it is justified seems to me to be just moral common sense. How could it be better that 10,000 or 50,000 or a million people die than that one person be injured?"
Under some forms of act-utilitarianism, he is right, but I think the number of people who heartily endorse that kind of ends-justify-the-means thinking is vanishingly small. While such a decision may save a million lives at the expense of one, my hunch is that making that correct assesment is a one in a million chance.

But back to the ticking time bomb, which is the classic scenario under which torture is supposedly justified. First, the scenario is so unlikely as to be not worth considering, as three conditions would have to be met: 1) we have to no with absolute certainty that there will be a terrorist attack and we have to know the time (otherwise we have no reason to think time is running out on the clock) 2) we have to be absolutely certain the person we want to torture has the relevant information, and 3)we have no idea where or how the attack will take place, or at least so little that we have no hope of succeeding with conventional investigation and the only possible solution is to extract the plot with torture.

This combination of absolute certainty and virtual ignorance about the same event is highly unlikely in the first place, but it also negates the utility of torture. Torture can reliably make someone talk, but it cannot force them to tell the truth. To use torture effectively, you have to have some knowledge of the situation so can separate the lies from the truth. In the time bomb scenario, you don't need to know anything about the time-frame (since you know the clock is ticking), but since you have no leads about the method or location, there's no way of knowing whether the toruree is telling the truth until you waste time (which is limited) following potentially false leads. Then again, the torturee may not even have the information you're looking for, although he's certainly going to give you AN answer if you torture him, it just won't be the RIGHT answer.

Then of course, we can remember that most expert interrogaters don't believe that torture is effective - you eventually here what you want to hear, and end up with a load of false information. And let's not forget (let's not forget) that despite using the mind probe and killing probably billions of people on Alderaan, Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin still didn't get the real location of the rebel base from princess Leia.