perfidy

Early this morning as I was (ma)lingering in bed trying to banish a night of dyspeptic dreams and turbulent slumber with fond anticipation of the CAT Scan I had scheduled for this afternoon, I was jerked to full awareness by the nasally voice of Alan Dershowitz on NPR talking about torture and asking what Kriston of Begging to Differ calls "the stupidest question ever asked."

When you torture somebody to death … everybody would acknowledge that’s torture. But placing a sterilized needle under somebody’s fingernails for fifteen minutes, causing excruciating pain but no permanent physical damage—is that torture?

First of all, unless it's part of some freaky sex thing you really better keep to yourself, the answer to that question is yes.

But you know what? The problem with Dershowitz' question, as with every time the cut-and-dried etudes of the so-called terror "debate" are trotted out on broken legs for one more sad routine, isn't that the "ticking time bomb" thing and the "needle in fingernail" thing are stupid, so much, but that they're useless. Dershowitz framed the question poorly, as often happens, and it cripples the debate before it can even get started. Either, as in Dershowitz' case, you start from the minimal assertion that "needle => fingernail => not torture" or you start from impossible "terrorist => nucular bomb => only you can help!!" principles. Neither is illustrative, and neither breeds actual debate. In either case, absent any other information, people quickly end up either arguing that sleep-deprivation is *never* nice to spring on a person, or attacking "The Left" for their limp-wristed inability to acknowledge that sometimes one must roll up their sleeves and get their hands slick with someone else's blood. Useless.

The question is uninteresting because it's a script, not real life.

To illustrate what I mean, I will pose an equally stupid counter-question regarding the abortion debate the content of which is also torn from the movies:

"You say abortion is always wrong. Well, consider a woman who has been drugged and raped by the devil, and the child growing inside her is a devil-baby. The only way to save the world is to abort the fetus. What do you do? What do you do?

It kind of seems to me that the time-bomb-thingy is exactly as helpful in the torture debate as Rosemary's Baby is in the abortion debate. I hereby decree that hereafter, any mention in an online debate of the "ticking time bomb scenario" shall be dubbed "Oppenheimer's Corollary," and the first party to invoke such shall automatically be considered as forfeiting the debate.