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McCain on Torture

Senator John McCain has a tremendous editorial on torture in the current Newsweek. As a former guest of the North Vietnamese, McCain speaks about torture with the perspective of someone who has been on the receiving end.

Simply put, “The mistreatment of prisoners harms us more than our enemies.” He notes that it doesn’t produce quality intelligence as “a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear.” So, the benefits are not what we might hope they would be. And on the cost side, legalized torture erodes the United States’ moral standing when in comes to humanitarian issues, and possibly gives license to other governments which may torture Americans in the future.

McCain addresses “the ticking time-bomb scenario” question. “What do we do if we capture a suspected terrorist who we have sound reasons to believe possesses specific information about an imminent terrorist attack?” He notes the possibility that torture can still be used even with it being illegal.

George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok has argued, on his blog MarginalRevolution.com, that keeping torture illegal “raises the price of torture” to the government official imposing it. But it “does not raise the price to infinity,” writes Tabarrok, “If the President or the head of the CIA thinks that torture is required to stop the ticking time bomb then they ought to approve it knowing full well that they face possible prosecution.”

McCain echoes Tabarrok’s concept. McCain suggests, “an interrogator might well try extreme measures to extract information that could save lives. Should he do so, and thereby save an American city or prevent another 9/11, authorities and the public would surely take this into account when judging his actions and recognize the extremely dire situation which he confronted.”

This seems like a much better policy than the Jack Bauer-approach of torturing everybody who might know anything that seems to be the modus operandi on Fox’s 24.

-- Kevin D. Rollins

Posted by Kevin D. Rollins on November 27, 2005 01:06 PM |

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