I take it from your post [Andrew Sullivan's - NG] that if you had been confronted on 7 September 2001 with a captured Khalid Shaykh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah and you knew that a major, mass-casualty terrorist strike was about to go down in the United States, and you had plenipotentiary authority for the nation's security, you would not have used any physically coercive techniques against the gentleman? Okay, but I do believe that moral men can go the other way, and I strongly suspect that the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans elected or appointed to high office would go the other way.
First of all, why does he not say 'torture' instead of 'physically coercive techniques'? But, second, what's wrong with Gerecht's question is that he has helped himself to three kinds of knowledge in setting up his example. There is knowledge that a major terrorist attack is impending; there is knowledge that the candidates for torture have useful information about it; and there is knowledge that torturing them will succeed in extracting the information in time to avert the attack. On those assumptions, Gerecht concludes that 'moral men' might authorize torture. But when did the situation he merely assumes ever exist? He is deciding on what should be policy by use of an abstract example, without care for the realism of the example. It is in fact unlikely that a relevant authority could have all three pieces of the knowledge they would need on Gerecht's way of looking at things. That they could have it as a matter of certainty is impossible.
The justification goes from a 'what if?' hypothesis which by its nature may hardly ever apply, to a general commitment that torture may, morally, be used. The international law position that torture is never justified better captures the prohibition that moral men and women would observe.