The ticking time bomb scenario is the standard hypothetical case advanced in defense of coercive interrogation methods, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s post-September 11 enhanced interrogation techniques. John Kiriakou characterizes the scenario as a fictional construct that “is only in the movies — it’s never happened in real life. It just doesn’t.”[1][2]
The scenario as posed
In the canonical version of the hypothetical, the United States has just captured an enemy combatant — for example Abu Zubaydah — and has reason to believe an attack of catastrophic magnitude is imminent (in the post-9/11 framing, Osama bin Laden’s public statement that he was planning “something that would dwarf 9/11”). The detainee refuses to cooperate. The interrogator is presented with a forced choice:
What do you do? Do you waterboard him? Do you sleep-deprive him? Do you put him in a cold cell? Do you beat him? Do you put cockroaches on him? Do you put hummus up his ass? What do you do?[2]
Kiriakou’s three-part refutation
Kiriakou rejects the scenario as a justification on three independent grounds:
- It is illegal. “First of all, all of it’s illegal.”[2]
- There is no real ticking time bomb. “There really is no such thing as the ticking time bomb. That’s only in the movies. It’s never happened in real life. It just doesn’t.”[2][3]
- Torture does not produce timely intelligence. “When you’re torturing somebody, they give you everything they think you want to hear just to get you to stop torturing them. And so then it’s going to take six months for the analyst to sort through it to figure out what’s true and what’s bullshit. And by then the bomb’s gone off anyway.”[4][3]
In a separate telling of the same argument, Kiriakou illustrates the delay point with John McCain’s example: tortured at the Hanoi Hilton and pressed for the names of his unit, McCain instead gave his captors the names of the 1965 Green Bay Packers’ offensive line, which his interrogators dutifully wrote down and would have taken months to unravel as fiction.[5]
Operational consequences in the real CIA program
Statements obtained from Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri are inadmissible at trial because the CIA tortured the statements out of them. The result, Kiriakou argues, is that the United States “continue[s] to hold them illegally without charge, or we let him go. The bottom line here is the CIA royally fucked this up.”[6][7]
A parallel legal theory: killing without trial
Kiriakou notes a related legal theory advanced by the Obama administration: Attorney General Eric Holder stated in an open congressional hearing, responding to a question from Senator Ron Wyden, that if the president declared a U.S. citizen inside the United States an imminent threat, the government could kill that citizen without benefit of a trial. Kiriakou says the administration never actually killed anyone on American soil under this theory, but claimed the legal justification to do so.[8]