SOS: Sink Or Swim?

Greetings, Program! Extra points if you know what movie that's from.

Here on THE WORDS OF MAGIC, we like to do a lot of theoretical stuff. So here's another one. By the way, this is mostly stolen borrowed adapted from Cory Doctorow's super-amazing book, "Little Brother". Passages in this funky font are verbatim passages, because he is such a good writer, I make it bad by paraphrasing. I don't know if I'll use any original passages yet, but we'll find out. The entire book is free and covered by the Creative Commons. For more info, go to CrapHound.Com, his website.

Imagine that you are walking around downtown on a weekend with your friends. You heard on the morning news that there was some sort of bomb threat on your city, but you didn't really pay all that much attention.

Suddenly, a large, un-marked van careens around a corner. People in blackout suits jump out, grab you and your friend, and throw you in the back. You are bound and gagged. As your captors tie you on to a rail in the back of the van, you see another hostage. She is crying. There are bruises all over her face, and her clothing is dirty and has been ripped in places. She has obviously been tortured. You are scared.

Suddenly, you hear voices. They are the voices of your captors. You can't make out entire sentences, but you pick up something about a bomb going off at noon, and strategic positioning of hostage vans. You hear that there is one "agent" missing, but he should turn up soon.

Pause the story for a second. Let's examine some of the logical assumptions you are probably making, and continue those lines of thought.

• I have been kidnapped by terrorists. They've planted a bomb somewhere, and they're planning on holding me hostage until their demands are met.
• One of the terrorists is missing. Maybe he's been picked up by the police or the FBI.
• My parents don't know where I am. My friends do, but they probably got picked up by one of the other hostage sites.
• The girl on my right has been tortured. She's probably going to be on the news in a demands video.

Now, lets assume that the missing man has gotten picked up by the US government. He has vital information relating to where you are. In this instance, if you had to choose between the police using torture to interrogate the missing man about your whereabouts, or have the police simply go on a wild goose chase, or worse yet, not know anything has happened, what would you choose? Torture? Hmmm...

Lets go on with our story. I think now would be a good time for a quote.

Who were these clowns? They weren't wearing insignia. Maybe they were terrorists! I'd never really believed in terrorists before -- I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me -- starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia -- that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists killed a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning.

Ignore the change from 3rd person to 1st person. Lets keep going.

If they were terrorists, I wanted to know. I didn't know what a terrorist looked like, though TV shows had done their best to convince me that they were brown Arabs with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses that hung down to their ankles. Not so our captors. They could have been half-time-show cheerleaders on the Super Bowl. They looked American in a way I couldn't exactly define. Good jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military. They came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled freely at one another as they sat down at the other end of the truck, joking and drinking coffees out of go-cups. These weren't Ay-rabs from Afghanistan: they looked like tourists from Nebraska.

You are forced to change from your day clothes into blue jumpsuits. Your phone was in your pocket. Now it is gone, and you loose hope for salvation. You are transferred into a large, white truck, and put into what looks like a cell in the back. A large, beefy man enters.

The man who came in was wearing a military uniform. A US military uniform. He saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back and that's when I knew that I wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists -- I was a prisoner of the United States of America.

Now the tables are turned. It turns out that you are not a Terrorist hostage, but have been kidnapped by the Department of Defense.

You hear the large, beefy man talk to one of the people who nabbed you. He talks in curt, crisp tones.

"These are just children," He says. "They can't be the ones we're looking for."

The woman he's talking to replies, "They were all at the right location, wearing nondescript clothes, and had almost no identifying information in their wallets. No cash, no names on their clothing, and weren't with any adults. These could be our men."

"Right. Move them to the base, and process them. Interrogation will begin at oh' eight hundred tomorrow morning."

Pause again. The Department of Defense has taken hostage a bunch of teenagers, who are a dubious threat to national security, and is about to interrogate them through torture. Maybe one of the 40 or so in the back of the truck with you might know something. But it's doubtful. And at any case, is it worth pushing you to the edge of death to get that information?

Some of you out there might be crying "No Fair" at this. You might be saying that this is a fictional event. True, but something similar, although slightly different circumstances, has occurred. This even happened at the same prison as in "Little Brother".

Torture may indeed be a viable way of extracting information from those who we need information from. But there is also a host of other alternative, none of which are anywhere near as damaging or controversial as torture.

There is no value to a human life, as it is priceless. I am not a religious person, not by a long shot, but I am reminded of one of the many, many commandments: Thou Shalt Not Put A Stumbling Block Before The Blind (or something like that). This means that you should not make more difficult the lives of those who in difficulty. Actually, there is very little debate amongst the Jewish culture about the validity of torture. See here.

Long story short (too late), torture is simply out of the question. There is no instance in which torture is applicable where there is no other course of action that could be as productive or even more so than torture.