In the city of Columbiana, it came out a few years ago that municipal employees were stealing from residents' homes.  Some of them had legitimate access, others used their positions (rodent control, tax assessor, etc.) to get into houses when they shouldn't have been there.  And they took money if they saw it lying around.

 At first, city hall quelled the outrage by prosecuting a few city workers who'd been caught.  All of them said everyone else was doing it, and their supervisors knew and approved, but the city's lawyers didn't pursue it, and the mayor said these were "a few bad apples".

 It turned out that lots of other homes were robbed, in places where the now-jailed workers had never been.  And there was an internal investigative report, leaked, that showed the practice was widespread.

None of this really shook things up until a couple of years later, when a memo from one of the top city lawyers became public: A memo that directly addressed how and when city workers should be legally allowed to rob residents.

More than a year has passed since then.  The mayor and most of the council have been voted out of office.  More memos have come out that show clearly that the city's legal department built up a rationale for stealing from residents' homes, and the former mayor knew about it.  Everyone involved is now saying that they did nothing wrong because they were told that all this theft was legal.

Residents of Columbiana are angry.

Yet some - political supporters of the former mayor, his allies on the council, and the city lawyers (one of whom is now a judge, a position he got before his memo came out) - say that stealing isn't necessarily wrong.  They're being interviewed by the local newspaper and radio station and TV news, and this is what some of them are saying:

"What if you've got two small children at home, and you and your spouse have lost your jobs, and you're running out of money.  You have very little food and you know that if you don't get more soon, your children will be malnourished and probably suffer permanent brain damage.

 You're walking by a rich man's house - you know he owns several restaurants in town - and you see some packages of food in front of his door, probably delivered recently.  He hasn't been home yet to bring the food inside.  Should you take a small amount, off the top of the pile, to bring home to your children, to tide them over until you can find a job?" 

 Columbiana is fictional.  Of course you know that nobody would be so brazen as to justify obvious crimes by appealing to a scenario which might possibly justify similar actions, but which has nothing to do with what actually happened!

And yet, the "ticking time bomb" scenario of torture is being taken seriously in our public debate.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that that scenario, unlike stealing food for starving children, is one that is unlikely to ever happen, anywhere, any time.  Because the ticking time bomb fantasy requires all of the following:

•  You know some horrible disaster is immediately imminent.
• That horrible thing will kill many many people if not prevented.
• You have a prisoner who you know, for a fact, knows the key fact you need to prevent the horrible disaster.
• Although the prisoner is unwilling to tell you, they will tell you if tortured.
• You can trust what they tell you under torture; they're not going to lie to misdirect you.

Leave aside for the moment any judgement about how likely all of those factors are to ever line up together in the real world.  Pretend that it's actually possible, even though it is almost impossible.

Nobody, nobody, has presented a single case of torture by the US government that actually met these criteria.

So why are we lending credence to the idea that talking about this ticking time bomb fantasy, whatever we think about the fantasy itself, can possibly justify crimes actually committed under very different circumstances?

Or, to put it another way: Columbiana's city workers had jobs, and their children had enough to eat.