re: #295 jill e

But this is in an individual situation where one person is being interrogated under very high pressure. Not all terrorists kill their own children.

No. Some fanatical Muslims kill their children, because they catch them holding hands with a member of the opposite sex or something. Others probably love their children very much, and would be very upset about possible harm coming to them.

I’d say, if it were to be okay to make idle threats against a detainee’s family, necessary but not necessarily sufficient requirements should be that (1) there was some reasonable chance of the threat succeeding in extracting useful information, and (2) the threat was made only for that instrumental purpose, never because the interrogator was just feeling angry and wanted to harass the detainee.