One of the right wing’s favorite talking points to defend torture is that it could be useful in a so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario. In 2005, for example, a “senior administration official” said President Bush’s signing statement waiving a torture ban was justified because a ”ticking time bomb” could necessitate the need for torture. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently endorsed “smacking someone in the face” if he were hiding “the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles.”

But in a House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) asked three jurists who have extensively studied interrogations if they have ever heard of such a scenario. As Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) put it, they responded with “radio silence“:

Marjorie Cohn, President, National Lawyer’s Guild: I know of one. It’s on the show 24. And that’s the only one I know of.

Philippe Sands, University College, London: I know none other, and I’ve never seen the show 24, so I don’t even know of that one.

David Luban, Georgetown University: I have been trying to chase down true ticking time bomb cases for a couple of years. There have been a couple that have been alleged to be ticking time bomb cases. They turned out not to be true.

Watch it:

Luban said that even a “poster child” ticking bomb scenario was bogus. He described a situation where an al Qaeda member was tortured in the Phillippines, eventually confessing about a plot on U.S. airliners and the pope. But Luban said the detainee “broke” under the threat of being turned over to another country — not after torture. “When you have torture as your A option, you don’t look at your B option,” he noted.

Even torture proponents can’t think of a scenario. One of the lawyers in the hearing, David Rivkin, a former Reagan Justice Department official, defended the administration throughout the hearing. But even he couldn’t think of a scenario, saying, “I personally do not have complete proof” of a particular instance.

Our guest blogger is Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org and veteran of the Iraq war.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress highlighted the latest reason from the Bush administration to oppose a real GI Bill for troops, offered by Senators Webb and Hagel. The Pentagon spokesperson said, in part:

[W]e are certainly concerned that this would be eligible to them after only two years of service. We think pegging it to a longer period of service — the number we have in mind, at this point, is six years of service — that the longer you stay in, the sweeter the benefits are to you. Six years would show a commitment to service. … The last thing we want to do is provide a benefit — or the last thing we want to do is create a situation in which we are losing our men and women who we have worked so hard to train.

Wow. There are a few very serious flaws in this logic:

First, the time of service isn’t a measure of commitment to service. What about the troops who served under six years, did a few tours in Iraq, and came back without a limb, and could no longer serve? Have they shown less of a commitment to America? I would love for this spokesperson to go to Walter Reed and tell anyone there who served three years, but now cannot continue their service, that they haven’t shown a commitment.

Second, no one is leaving the military after two years. I’d note that when you sign up, it’s for an eight year contract, most for four years active. They can serve in a number of ways. For example, I served four and a half years active (because I was Stop Lossed), went to grad school and served in the reserves, but was called back up after ten months. So, the point remains that you’re not talking about a flood of people breaking their contract after three or four years. The overwhelming majority of men and women serve out their contract for eight years, so even if they do begin school when they’re done with their active duty commitment, the military can call them up at any time they need them, for the life of the troop’s contract. A GI Bill isn’t going to change it.

Third is that if the administration was serious about retention, they would focus on the role of contractors, who continually snatch up troops, offering them up to 10 times their military pay to do a similar job in Iraq. That’s a much bigger threat to retention than offering a service-member the chance to get a quality education. Read more