Mageth

His apartment was searched and a bomb found with the timer set to go off in one 1 hour.

Oh, BTW, contrary to TV and the movies, most "professional" bombs don't have a digital clock ticking off the milliseconds for the good guys to fret over.

BTW, if you want to watch a pretty good, fairly realistic (better than most) action movie about bombs and disarming them, rent Juggernaut, with Richard Harris.

Mageth

Maybe the terrorist holds up, maybe not. The point is without coercion the bomb goes boom, and 100,000 men women and children die, and another million burned by radiation .

The point is, in the hypothetical, the bomb goes BOOM whether you torture the terrorist or not. One hour of torture is simply not long enough to get the correct answer from a dedicated terrorist. Neither is two days, for most. So why torture? Put the guys out on the street, searching likely places, searching for any clues, or helping to evacuate civilians. A higher payoff scenario.

dk

You’ve got an hour until the bomb goes off, in 10 minutes the terrorist can be safely transported by a helicopter By the way 4 men and women have volunteered to stay the course, on the off chance the terrorist cooperates.

Autonemesis

Interrogation is a world apart from torture. If the captive is committed to resist, and trained to resist, you simply may never get that info, no matter what you do to him. From what I have read, information gained from torture is usually very unreliable. The victim will tell his captors anything they want to hear to get them to stop. Whether its true or not becomes beside the point. In the end, torture becomes about retribution, not information gathering. It is immoral in every case.

Mageth

You’ve got an hour until the bomb goes off, in 10 minutes the terrorist can be safely transported by a helicopter By the way 4 men and women have volunteered to stay the course, on the off chance the terrorist cooperates.

Like I said, we've learned these terrorists are more than willing to die for their cause. Your scenario has no hope of working.

Besides, if the terrorists thought we might do this, they could simply make the bomb manually "unstoppable" (e.g. no "cancel" code) once initiated, or use someone to plant and initiate the bomb who has no knowledge of how to stop it.

In any case, if these terrorists are like the 9/11 terrorists, the most likely scenario is a "suicide" detonation, so the hypothetical scenario where we catch the bomb-planter fleeing the city is unlikely.

Autonemesis

I thought you said "Let's be a little more realistic." This sounds like the draft script for Die Hard 4.

Mageth

You're right, Kind Bud. I'll add to what I said above:

Oh, BTW, contrary to TV and the movies, most "professional" bombs don't have a digital clock ticking off the milliseconds for the good guys to fret over.

And contrary to TV and the movies, most bombs don't have a keypad and secret code for cancelling the countdown.

dk

I don’t find the hypothetical unrealistic. You might want to check a palm pilot or PC, they have clocks, keypads and passwords. It would be a piece of cake to program an activation sequence. Anyone educated enough to put together a nuclear bomb would be smart enough to install a timer with a password to a timer shut off mechanism. None of your arguments have addressed the issue, so I have to categorize your moral indignation as little more than denial.

Mageth

I don’t find the hypothetical unrealistic. You might want to check a palm pilot or PC, they have clocks, keypads and passwords.

Last time I checked, they weren't terrorist bombs, either.

Anyone educated enough to put together a nuclear bomb would be smart enough to install a timer with a password to a timer shut off mechanism.

Umm, but exactly why would they want to do that, if it could lead to failure of their mission through last-minute action of a hero? That wouldn't be very smart, would it?

This is the real world we're talking about, not James Bond or Die Hard. The villians don't think up overly-elaborate ways to kill their victims, they don't give a long monologue on why they're going to kill you, and they don't put digital clocks and keypads on the outside of their bombs so the heroes can figure out the cancel code and disarm the bomb with .01 seconds left.

Valmorian

*laugh* Ok, so this guy is a TERRORIST, right? No demands, I presume, just the desire to strike back at 'The Evil Americans'.

Can you explain why he would even HAVE a way to defuse these bombs? If they could find terrorists willing to die in order to fly planes into buildings, surely they could find one willing to die in order to destroy a city.