The Myth of the Ticking Time Bomb

By Alfred W. McCoy, The Progressive. Posted September 14, 2006.

Ask not for whom the bomb ticks, Mr. and Ms. America. Right now, across Los Angeles, timers on dozens of toxic nerve-gas canisters are set to detonate in just hours and send some two million Americans to their deaths in writhing agony.

But take hope. We have one chance, just one, to avert this atrocity and save the lives of millions. Agent Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorist Unit has his hunting knife poised over the eye of a trembling traitor who may know the identity of those who set these bombs. As a clock ticks menacingly and the camera focuses on knife point poised to plunge into eyeball, the traitor breaks and identifies the Muslim terrorists, giving Agent Bauer the lead he needs to crack this case wide open.

As happens with mind-numbing regularity every week on Fox Television's hit show 24, torture has once again worked to save us all from the terror of a ticking bomb, affirming for millions of loyal viewers that torture is a necessary weapon in George Bush's war on terror. "Major success from limited, surgical torture is a fable, a fiction. . . . As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution." Just days before the fifth anniversary of 9/11, President Bush himself appeared live from the East Room before an audience of handpicked 9/11 families for a dramatic announcement that mimed, with eerie precision, the ticking-bomb logic of 24, which is wildly popular among Washington's neoconservatives. With clipped, secret-agent diction reminiscent of the show's Emmy Award-winning star, Kiefer Sutherland, Bush said he was transferring fourteen top Al Qaeda captives, including the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, from long-secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay. At once both repudiating and legitimating past abuses, Bush denied that he had ever authorized "torture." Simultaneously, he defended the CIA's effort to coerce "vital information" from these "dangerous" captives with what the President called an "alternative set of procedures"--a euphemism transparent to any viewer of 24.

In defense of the CIA's past and future use of this "alternative set of procedures," Bush told his national television audience a thrilling tale of covert action derring-do almost plucked from the pages of a script for 24. After "they risked their lives to capture some of the most brutal terrorists on Earth," courageous American agents "worked day and night" to track down "a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden" named Abu Zubaydah. But once in custody, he was "defiant and evasive." Knowing that "captured terrorists have . . . intelligence that cannot be found any other place," the CIA, with White House approval, applied that "alternative set of procedures" and thereby extracted timely information that "helped in the planning . . . of the operation that captured Khalid Sheik Mohammed." Then, "KSM was questioned by the CIA using these procedures," producing intelligence that stopped a succession of lethal ticking bombs.

The mind-boggling catalogue of these plots, the President told us, included "Al Qaeda's efforts to produce anthrax," a terror assault on U.S. Marines in Djibouti with "an explosive-laden water tanker," "a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi using car bombs," "a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow," and "planned attacks on buildings in the United States" with bombs planted "to prevent the people trapped above from escaping out the windows."

Of course, the President could not, he said with a knowing wink to his audience, describe "the specific methods used in these CIA interrogations" because "it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning." Although these "procedures were tough," they had proved vital, the President assured us, in extracting "information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else" and thus prevented Al Qaeda from "launching another attack against the American homeland." If Congress and the Supreme Court would simply set aside their constitutional qualms about these "tough" methods, Bush concluded, then the "brave men and women" who work in this CIA program can continue "to obtain information that will save innocent lives."

As in so many of these ticking-bomb tales, Bush's supposed successes crumble on closer examination. Just four days later, The New York Times reported that the FBI claimed it got the key information from Abu Zubaydah with its noncoercive methods and that other agencies already had much of his supposedly "vital" intelligence.

Like President Bush, influential pro-pain pundits have long cited the ticking-bomb scenario to defend torture as a necessary evil in the war on terror. Indeed, in this most pragmatic of modern societies, we are witnessing a rare triumph of academic philosophy in the realm of national security.

Alfred W. McCoy, the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author most recently of "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror."

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