To Torture or Not to Torture

Excellent post at Ace of Spades about torture, which goes nicely with some more nuanced stuff here and stuff over at Belmont Club. An excerpt of an article in Ace's piece:

The three men were brought before Thomas. He asked them where the bomb was. The terrorists—highly dedicated and steeled to resist interrogation—remained silent. Thomas asked the question again, advising them that if they did not tell him what he wanted to know, he would kill them. They were unmoved.

So Thomas took his pistol from his gun belt, pointed it at the forehead of one of them, and shot him dead. The other two, he said, talked immediately; the bomb, which had been placed in a crowded railway station and set to explode during the evening rush hour, was found and defused, and countless lives were saved.

On other occasions, Thomas said, similarly recalcitrant terrorists were brought before him. It was not surprising, he said, that they initially refused to talk; they were schooled to withstand harsh questioning and coercive pressure. No matter: a few drops of gasoline flicked into a plastic bag that is then placed over a terrorist's head and cinched tight around his neck with a web belt very quickly prompts a full explanation of the details of any planned attack.

It is childish in the extreme to ban torture as a method of getting information out of terrorists who target civilians. As Andrew McCarthy writes in a column linked by the saucy Michelle Malkin:

But the critics should do us all a favor: If you're going to talk the talk of righteous indignation, be ready to walk the walk. Be ready to tell Americans exactly what protections you want to give to the terrorists. Be ready to tell Americans that you would prohibit coercive interrogation even if it were the only way of saving a hundred thousand of them.

In keeping with the movie theme in the post above, I've noticed that there is a basic code of hero conduct in films and TV that says we do not stoop to their level unless the bad guys are so bad that it doesn't matter. Well, in the case of terrorists who target civilians, it doesn't matter. Torture away, when it's the difference between life and death for innocent people. Thomas in Sri Lanka doesn't have time to fuck around, and neither do we.