Quote Originally Posted by Cloud No.9
i don't believe in cruel techniques under any circumstance. you cannot invent a scenario where you defiently know a man knows something, that doesn't happen there is always the chance you are wrong, you intelligence might be flawed, the man who handed him over might be corrupt, mistakes might have been made. a few hundred thousand iraqi's will tell you there is no such thing as 100% proof and why you cannot rely on such things to take lives.

you would never need to evacuate new york city as a bomb of that size is not feasible. and if you are evacuating an area that size because you do not know where the bomb is then you don't know where the bomber is either.

such a scenario cannot exist in the real world. so you do not know the man has a bomb, you think he has a bomb. are you prepared to shoot a man on a think?

you need absolute proof before you can take a man's life or torture a man. otherwise you are led down a very dark alley.
Umm we can't even prove 100% that we landed on the moon. If you're going to wait for absolute proof, then for all intents and purposes you wouldn't take the guy's life even if your best intel says he has a nuke in the van. Because in the real world you'll never know for sure. Even our court system is not based on the absolute proof idea, because absolute proof is rarely possible. Instead it's beyond a reasonable doubt. meaning that if your 100% proof standard applied to all crimes, the prisons should be emtied. It just isn't realistic to wait for 100% absolute proof.

The second thing is that in the van case, being wrong has grave consequences. Let the bomb go off while you are negotiating and talking, and quite frankly you will have some civillian deaths, deaths that will not happen if you take the guy out. Now if an evacuation is possible, yes that's probably the best course of action. But I suspect that Susquach is right that the guy in the van is going to blow it up if he sees a massive evacuation. Now if it is possible to arrest the guy and not have anyone die, that's the best answer. But to be honest with you, I think the odds of that happening are fairly low. So you just can't count on the "best solution", you have to work toward the one with the greatest odds of success.

I'd say the same thing in the torture case. If I have a limited time to find the bomb, and I have strong evidence that he knows where the bomb is, then I'm going to make him uncomfortable. I don't think it will work to just sit down over starbucks and talk to him. He's been trained not to answer questions. I don't think I can rely on the rest of the police force to tear apart every building in NYC to find the bomb in a limited time. NYC is HUGE and if the bomb is a car bomb, it's probably moving the whole time. So really both situations are very similar in my mind. If the only probable way to prevent civillian deaths is to torture the suspect you have in custody, then that's how it is. I'd prefer to not have to do so, but you have to protect the civillian population of the city.