Via Sullivan, this Hugh Hewitt interview with retired Army Colonel Stuart Herrington, which featured this tidbit:

HH: Now an e-mail. Mr. Hewitt, can you ask the Colonel if we would authorize torture regarding someone who knows of a nuke about to go off in minutes or hours. SH: Yeah, that’s the so-called ticking time bomb scenario. The difficulty with that is that that question poses a hypothetical which in my experience, I never ran into a hypothetical like that. If you pose the rectitude, or lack thereof, of torture based upon that hypothetical, you’re not really dealing in the real world. That’s my answer to that. HH: In an era when we’ve had attempted dirty bomb importation into the United States, and we’ve had WMD used here, in anthrax, at least, are there some circumstances where at least at a classified lever, people ought to walk through those scenarios, to have the rules laid down in stone, Colonel? SH: I’m sorry, but I didn’t get the thrust of that. HH: The thrust is, should…I don’t know whether you want to do it publicly, but shouldn’t the military be walking through those scenarios, and establishing the guidelines right now, so that they’re not improvised when and if such hypotheticals occur? SH: You mean the interrogation guidelines? HH: Yeah. SH: Yeah, well I think the answer to that is that you know, the type of information you’re trying to get is obviously situation dependent, and sometimes the situation is more critical than others, but there’s got to be, and that’s what’s going on now, a healthy deliberation, and a laying down of here are the procedures…and this has been done already, here are the procedures that are authorized, here are some more aggressive procedures that are not authorized without the approval of so and so, and here are procedures that you will never do, and so that everyone knows basically what the ground rules are, so there’s no room for hot doggery, you know?

I particularly enjoyed how, even after being told the scenario is not in the real world, Hugh pressed on and thought that guidelines should be created for the fantasy ticking time bomb scenario anyway. That would go a long way to explain our policy decisions the past 5-6 years, and I suggest the administration already has a guy who would be perfect for creating guidelines and policies in fantasy situations- Doug Feith.

Herrington did have some suggestions as to what does work:

HH: Is it effective? Is water boarding effective? SH: Boy, you know what? I can’t tell you that. I’ve never practiced it. I consider it to be abhorrent, a practice that shouldn’t be practiced by any professional interrogator, and you’re going to have to ask someone other than me. But I, generally speaking, know from experience that when you levy brutality against a person in order to get that person to talk, even if the person hasn’t got anything to say, or doesn’t know what it is that you want, they’ll come up with something to say just to get you to quit doing it. HH: Do you play on fears of family and their safety, not reprisal, but you know, going back to be with them? Is that effective? SH: You know, the developmental approach involves engaging someone in conversation and evaluating them. And certainly, I’ve had cases where family played a big part. I once had a prisoner in Panama, for example, who was on his second day of captivity, was in tears, and was depressed, and the guards told me they were worried about him. When I went to see him, it turned out that you know, he’d been captured for three days, his wife didn’t know if he was dead or alive. He had an 18 month old child at home, and he was just totally depressed and in a deep funk over it. I got a cell phone, and we called his wife. I was his friend for life after that.

If that happened today, the pro-torture Republican party and her blogospheric nitwit enablers would advocate having the man stripped down naked, have menstrual blood smeared on him while chained him to the floor in either an exceptionally hot or exceptionally cold room with blaring music. When that didn’t work, they would waterboard him. If the press found out, Donald Rumsfeld would have clucked that he stands all day long at work, so how bad could that really be?

The reason Hugh and others are so desperate to validate the necessity of torture through the ticking time bomb scenario is that it is the only way to justify it, because torture just isn’t effective for information gaining purposes. There are other practices that are better, and that do not debase yourself, your country, and terrorize the victim. In essence, the ticking time bomb scenario is not unlike the old joke (some are claiming it was Churchill and not Shaw, I don’t know- I just googled parts of the joke and this is what I came up with. Wikipedia credits both of them, FYI.):

Some years ago, George Bernard Shaw and a middle-aged London socialite engaged in one of the most famous encounters in the battle of the sexes. Shaw asked the woman if she would sleep with him for a million pounds. She responded with an enthusiastic “yes!” Then Shaw playfully lowered the offer to one pound and sixpence. “Certainly not!” the woman huffed, “what do you think I am?” Shaw smiled and said, “We’ve already established that . . . now we’re haggling about the price.”

The only way they can justify torture is through the worst-case scenario, and then, once it is validated in their own minds, they can apply the torture procedures downward. In short, the ticking time bomb advocates are just haggling for a price.

*** Update ***

I have to comment on this, btw:

HH: You’re not a Steelers fan, are you, Colonel? SH: Oh, I have to say I am. HH: You know, that’s…it’s a very sad thing when I find otherwise upright Americans who lack football sense. SH: But my credibility would be zero if I said no. HH: No, that’s true, but it’s sort of like an accident of birth.

Browns won a Super Bowl, yet, Hugh?

That is what I thought.