It is never justified to torture terrorists.

pro says we can't take the terrorists seriously, so we cant know there's a bomb. as i stated in my initial post though, there is corroborating evidence.... say, the FBI has been tracking bomb activity for a long time, with connections all verifying it's all true, witnesses, hard evidence such as nuclear material and bombs etc trading hands etc. they could have known that he possessed the bomb recently, and now it's set. witnesses corroborate that it's been set etc. if we wanted to get more crazy with the hypothetical.. we could have a situation where the person is blowing up an area, then another etc etc just so we know he will continue at a very high probability. the purpose of this hypothetical is to again illustrate that there are possible situations where torture would be necessary, even if in this case it's more hypothetical and less likely to actually happen. but, aside from this, as just mentioned, there are more realistic scenarios too. pro simply wants to ignore reality... if he can envision a world where torture would never be necessary he doesn't have to make the hard decision that would allow millions to die. he waxed on poetically about how he thought everyone 'knew' torture was wrong, but i think his insistance on dodging tough decisions shows that he knows it would be wrong to just allow those people to die... a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. he continues with his nuclear finding capablities. if it was so easy, people wouldn't question whether iran or a country has nukes... they would know. these are merely tools that help if circumstances are receptive to it... eg, carrying nukes open to the sky and surveillence, or nukes that are poorly hidden, or nukes that escape detection via lead or whatever material helps hide them. the means are not always there to find them. con is assuming we're talking about NYC proper, as i said the bomb could easily be the surounding metropolis too, too large to turn inside out. for that matter, we could assume that we know there's a bomb, but we dont know which city, etc. he's poking holes in the hypothetical that at best are showing how the hypotheical needs tweaked is all (he's actually not even showing that), more incidental stuff... not that he's right about the core dispute. all con is doing is again trying to find a way to avoid making the tough decisions. i'm not arguing that "it's their fault so we can do what we want" as simply as that.... i might venture to agree it'd be wrong to torture him if we had other ways to detect the bomb. i'm assuming there are no other means or tactics... and when we look at whether to torture, that value call in and of itself, we can say that that person has forgone their right to not be tortured, their inherent worth in that regard, etc. it's a distraction to talk about the law or presidential authorization etc... this debate is clearly about the moral decisions involved in and of themselves. these are merely incidental considerations, that are only relevant incidentally to the heart of the discussion. con won't show that torture never works... because he knows he can't. there are surely times when it does work. this is common sense. he might argue that torture is unneeded cause he contends he found ways around torture.... but i contend that he hasn't shown this. there are hypotehtical situations where torture would be required and very potentially helpful. given we can take even con's tacit admission that torture works sometimes.... if we can conclue, which we are forced to conclude, that when all else fails, torture does remain a viable option for possibly gathering necessary information.