Advocacy of Torture
Bruce Anderson has been an advocate of torture in ticking time bomb scenarios, even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks brought the question to greater public prominence. In February 2010 he wrote a column for The Independent, arguing that the British government would have not just the right, but the duty, to torture if there was a ticking bomb, and that they should torture children if they believed that doing so would yield information that would avert a terrorist attack:
| “ | It came, in the form of a devilish intellectual challenge. "Let's take your hypothesis a bit further. We have captured a terrorist, but he is a hardened character. We cannot be certain that he will crack in time. We have also captured his wife and children". After much agonising, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one answer to Sydney's question. Torture the wife and children. | ” |
Read more about this topic: Bruce Anderson (columnist)
Famous quotes containing the word torture:
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)