This is curious not only because America's actual torture program had nothing to do with ticking time-bombs, but also because the logic is extremely weak even in the abstract.

To understand this fully, an illustration is useful, and Jonah Goldberg has provided us with one at National Review. Traditionally, Americans have regarded the taboo against torture as a triumph of civilization and Judeo-Christian values. That's how President Reagan cast it during his last year in office. A quarter century later, Goldberg would have us believe that the taboo against torture is unfortunate because it's just too effective at stigmatizing brutality.

That's really his argument:

One of the great problems with the word “torture” is that it tolerates no ambiguity. It is a taboo word, like racism or incest. Once you call something torture, the conversation is supposed to end. It’s a line no one may cross. As a result, if you think the enhanced interrogation techniques are necessary, or simply justified, you have to call them something else. Similarly, many sincere opponents of these techniques think that if they can simply call them “torture,” their work is done. The problem is that the issue isn’t nearly so binary. Even John McCain — a vocal opponent of any kind of torture — has conceded that in some hypothetical nuclear ticking-time-bomb scenario, torture might be a necessary evil. His threshold might be very high, but the principle is there nonetheless. And nearly everyone understands the point: When a greater evil is looming in the imminent future, the lesser evil becomes more tolerable. This is why opponents of the interrogation program are obsessed with claiming that it never worked, at all.

The many flaws in this argument can be grasped most quickly if we apply its logic to another taboo practice. So with apologies for the necessity of uncomfortable subject matter, consider something we can all agree to be abhorrent: the rape of six-year-old children, which is, needless to say, illegal and immoral. And I imagine that an interrogator threatening to rape the six-year-old child of an Al Qaeda terrorist who refused to talk could be more effective than waterboarding. Let's see how Goldberg's logic fares, using words almost identical to his:

One of the great problems with the phrase “child rape” is that it tolerates no ambiguity. It is a taboo phrase, like racism or incest. Once you call something child rape, the conversation is supposed to end. It’s a line no one may cross. As a result, if you think raping the children of suspected terrorists is necessary, or simply justified, you have to call it something else. Similarly, many sincere opponents of these techniques think that if they can simply call them “child rape,” their work is done.

The problem is that the issue isn’t nearly so binary. Even John McCain—a vocal opponent of any kind of child rape—has conceded that to save millions of innocents from a nuclear ticking-time-bomb, child rape might be a necessary evil. His threshold might be very high, but the principle is there nonetheless. And nearly everyone understands the point: When a greater evil is looming in the imminent future, the lesser evil becomes more tolerable. This is why opponents of child rape are obsessed with claiming that it would never work, at all.