Rick Moran makes a careful case that Jonah Goldberg is wrong on the issue of torture.  I find Moran's position to be more defensible: We don't live in a made-for-TV Jack Bauer/"24" world where we always catch up with terrorists just as they're about to destroy something and/or somebody, a situation where torture might be justified as mortally necessary.

Moran correctly identifies the slippery slope argument:  To torture to stop catastrophe is one step, or a half step, from torturing because it expedites the gathering of information, itself a step or half step from practicing torturing to stay in tune.  Then, there is torture for its own sake, one having developed a taste for it.

Some societies, some peoples long ago seem to have taken that downward slope.  Another way of looking at it is that the human race began at the bottom of that slope—and there some remain.  We know who they are by their works.

A further point: torture is a final option.  Sould we bungle the strategy and tactics necessary to win this world war, we will find torture and other forms of mayhem to be the only options—the point at which we have become them.