How Much is Too Much??

Jim was watching a movie last night that I found very disturbing. I forget the title at the moment, but the premise is that a terrorist has planted three nuclear bombs at various American cities and set them to go off simultaneously. The terrorist is arrested, and the FBI attempts to inteerrogate him, to find out where the bombs are hidden. The terrorist is an ex American military, so their methods of interrogation had no affect on him. So they brought in an interrogation specialist, who resorte.d to various methods of torture, which included but were certainly not limited to cutting off fingers, and injuring various parts of his body. At one point it looked to me like he was on the verge of death. Jim and I got into a serious argument, because as ex military, he felt that any method of torture was , justified, to prevent the potential deaths of millions of citizens. I countered as I learned from moral theology, that one can never use an evil means to acheive a good end. To me, it would be no different than bombing an abortion clinic. You may force it to close down, but what if one of the workers there dies in the blast?? What would that say to a world which expects Christians to be peacekeepers? Aside from which, if you open the door to toture, where does it stop? You could have the Nazis all over again!