The capture of the 15 British soldiers by Iran provides a tidy test case for torture apologists. The sailors have already confessed to trespassing in Iranian waters, even though I’m sure that most of them have no idea where they were in the Persian Gulf, exactly, when the Iranians picked them up. Is it fine for Iran to coerce confessions and information from these British sailors? What if Iran declares them “unlawful combatants” before they do it? And most importantly, what moral authority do we have to demand that the Iranians not mistreat those sailors given our own practices when it comes to torturing people we capture? Or must we just rely on letting them know that we have bigger guns, so they must bend to our will?