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what if we had captured one of the 9/11 terrorists on the morning of the attacks but before the airplanes were hijacked?
This hypothetical perfectly captures the problem with the "ticking time bomb" scenario: it relies on totaly guesswork to determine what constitutes an "extreme" situation.
Say on the morning of September 11, according to this question, we'd had Ziad al-Jarrah in custody. The idea, presumably, is that we'd begin ripping the fingernails off a man who had as yet committed no crime on the pure supposition that he might, in an alternatie timeline, be about to try and pilot a plane into the U.S. Capitol.
Fine and good, one might say, if by doing so we could have prevented the deaths on that day.
But if this is the standard: what's to prevent the government from, say, crushing the testicles of a commenter named wbegonne if they see a reason to?
What exactly?
