Over at the Coalition for Clarity<\/a>, an ardent pro-torture combox warrior declares that if you oppose torture you are no kind of real man<\/a>.<\/p>\n The odd claim of manliness by people who are continually ready to piddle all over themselves in fear of non-existent ticking time bomb scenarios and to urge the most panic-driven and draconian public policies on the basis of their hysterical fear is one of the more piquant charms of the pro-torture movement. Like the hilarious claim of hard-bitten \u201crealism\u201d (based on watching Bruce Willis films and \u201c24\u201d), it is a thing spun from whipped air, like cotton candy\u2013only poisonous. The scenario is always the same: America faces nothing but a continual onslaught of Jack Bauer ticking time bombs. The people we are torturing are always people we know to be a fountain of information that will save millions of lives. Seconds count. So what else can we possible do but torture the bastard? And if we question the realism of this panic-driven fever dream, we want nothing more than to give the terrorist milk and cookies and send them back to their work of murdering innocents. Indeed, in the inverted moral universe of the torture enthusiast, the choice to do something worthy of the everlasting fires of hell is embraced with a prideful boast about one\u2019s courage and the grave sinner strikes a pose of Miltonesque \u201ccourage\u201d declaring, \u201clet\u2019s say that I lose my soul to save innocent lives. Then so be it.\u201d<\/a> In other words, \u201cBetter to reign in hell than serve in Heaven\u201d as Milton\u2019s Satan put it.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take this logic apart step by step.<\/p>\n At no point does the coward indulging these fantasies stop to ask how he reconciles his favorite claim of \u201cHey! It was just three high value targets!\u201d with the fevered vision of a relentless horde of millions of ticking time bomb-weilding orcs. If we\u2019ve only tortured three times (a lie, to be sure, but one which I\u2019ll grant for the moment) then three guys is hardly a good basis for sweeping changes in public policy that overturn the settled view of all authorities secular and ecclesial for a hundred years, is it?<\/p>\n No, it\u2019s not. Particularly because the torture is often (80% of the time at Abu Ghraib and many times at other sites) inflicted against people who, oopsie, turned out to be innocent. That\u2019s why civilized societies don\u2019t listen to cowards who shout in their panic that we should just fold the punishment phase into the evidence-gathering phase of fighting evil. This method, while it may appeal to people whose logic processes, under the lash of fear and cowardice, function like this:<\/p>\n