I’d heard this opinion often enough from liberals when they discussed torture but have to thank Matt Damon for giving me a nice quote:
”Look, the best line about torture I’ve heard came from [retired CIA officer turned war-on-terrorism critic] Milt Beardon,” Damon says. “He said, `If a guy knows where a dirty bomb is hidden that’s going to go off in a Marriott, put me in a room with him and I’ll find out. But don’t codify that. Just let me break the law.’
“Which I think is right. You can’t legalize torture. But anybody would do it in that situation. You’d do it to me in that situation; you’d pull out my fingernails if you thought I knew something like that.”
How lovely!
They aren’t anti-torture. They just want to pretend, to lie, to have some fig leaf to hide behind.
I’ve got a better idea, Matt… Let’s *not* but say we do.
They’re not really anti-war, either. That’s because they are “post-ideological,” right?
Let me elaborate. This is called civil disobedience. If you believe that a law is unjust, or that not breaking the law will result in a situation that is worse than the crime of breaking the law, then you are ethically bound to break that law. Now comes the part that everyone seems to leave out. Having broken the law knowingly, you must accept the punishment. And if as we claim we are a society of laws, we must prosecute the crime. Having said that, there is not a single documented case of a ticking time bomb scenario. It doesn’t happen in the real world, only on McGiver. Moreover, every case of torture should be prosecuted, and if the mythical ticking time bomb was out there, and the detainee knew where it was, and we were able to disarm it before it detonated, and that consequently many lives were saved, and only if all these criteria are first met, then I believe that a jury would accept and acquit any level of torture.