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:
“Imagine that it is you yourself who are erecting the edifice of human destiny with the aim of making men happy in the end, of giving them peace and contentment at last, but that to do that it is absolutely necessary, and indeed quite inevitable, to torture to death only one tiny creature, the little girl who beat her breast with her little fist, and to found the edifice on her unavenged tears—would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)