A Revealing Scenario

Some time ago, there was an article on The Belmont Club, entitled The last brother, about Kalid Sheik Mohammed and the specific terrorist-related information gained and "lessons good guys through the use of the interrogation techniques, notably waterboarding, used on him.

It was an interesting article, and I decided to post a comment that reflects, I feel sure, the single proposition that every opponent of interrogation should be required to answer while connected to a polygraph.  The response, or lack thereof, to my comment was underwhelming, to say the least.  As I was reminded again, most of the commentors to such blogs are well known to each other (a merry little band as it were) and, without fail, tend to spiral off into in-depth discussions of nothing related to the specific article.  No real harm there, other than reflecting a general lack of interest in serious questions, but it did remind me to be a little judicious about where to put my two cents' worth in.

Nevertheless, I still have received no feedback to my comment, so I repeat it here in the hope that someone else might have a thought on it:

"A most interesting and stimulating discussion. I can’t help but wonder, though, about the following scenario:

Let’s just say that our intelligence people picked up a rumor from a reliable source, and had it verified by another reliable source, that there was a terrorist attack (whether by Osama bin Laden or Timothy McVeigh or Bill Ayers or whoever) planned that would be aimed specifically at the city that YOU or YOUR family lives in. Let’s further say that they had a person or two under surveillance or in their possession who were identified as very possibly being a part of that plot. Because of the short time period to respond, they can only evacuate half of the people in that area.

Who among us would then say “It is immoral and criminal to waterboard (or worse) to get what information they could from them?”"