Well, I've already answered your questions pretty clearly but let's rehash:

1) First question: how do your interrogators know they've reached the end of their rope using conventional surveillance and interrogation?

Because for weeks and weeks they've been trying all the standard interrogation techniques, including Fear Up Harsh, Pride And Ego Down, and everything else and the terrorist is completely recalcitrant. They are getting nowhere. He just laughs at them, spits in their eyes, calls their mothers whores, and begs them to scratch his balls. Complete and total failure. Next!

2) Even if time is of the essence, how do they know torture will work better?

Because it can't work any worse than total failure. The whole idea of torture is that it forces people. He's not cooperating voluntarily. Now we'll try involuntarily. It's a last resort. It may not work. But with 15 million lives on the line, we have to try. I repeat: 15 million individual human being's lives are on the line.

3) Beyond that, can any narrative contrivance create interrogators who can know 1) they're missing one piece of evidence that will save lives, whereas existing information won't?

Yes. In the scenario, they have recorded him participating in planning discussions in which his going to the location of the bomb is discussed and his knowledge of the location of the bomb is discussed and assumed but no one actually reads out the address. Maybe we have a tape in which we hear the top terrorist say to the guy we are holding, "The location of the bomb is written on this paper in our prearranged code. It is of vital importance that you memorize the location and destroy this paper."

4) 2)the detainee possesses it

See the answer to 3) above.

5) 3)torturing him will get him to reveal it, while other methods can't?

See the answers to 1) and 2) above.

We have "conclusive evidence" of many things in life. But there isn't any case I can imagine where these interrogators could know beyond a reasonable doubt that their existing information (so exhaustively accumulated) is insufficent to save lives, yet one specific bit of information is missing and will save lives; that the detainee knows this information; and torture will obtain that information while every other method will fail.

See the answers to 1), 2), and 3) above.

It's "possible", you say? You have the burden of proof here. Describe such a scenario, taking each required aspect into account, and you get to move to the next step. The scenario we've been working with has such a long time frame that, aside from general implausibility (hence irrelevancy to human moral concerns), it's hard to see how the interrogators would know the saving of lives would depend on a single piece of information, and that abusing one person would reveal it.

See my first post and the answers to 1), 2), and 3) above.

But let's say you can describe such a scenario - how do the interrogators know torture will work? After all, stipulating all other means have failed - over ten years or some other exhaustive time - to obtain the information doesn't prove torture will get it for you, or that other methods won't eventually succeed.

See the answers to 1), 2), and 3) above.

You haven't made any sort of case that a consequentialist approach is superior to a deontological one except in the extremely rare and - by your own admission - completely rigged scenario where all the details of a horrendous act are known except for one key fact.

Since you admit that I came up with an exception, then universalist deontology is thereby reduced to absurdity. Demonstrating aburdity is a pretty strong case.

It seems pretty clear from their statements that Cheney, Rumsfeld et alia were coming from a purely consequentialist approach in ordering torture. Read The One Percent Doctrine for a pretty clear depiction of where that leads.

They weren't in a ticking time bomb scenario and they're not really very good at philosophy or public policy.

First: you absolutely cannot ever know with Jack Bauer certainty that you can prevent 15 million deaths by torturing one person. You'd be guessing.

I don't know what "Jack Bauer" certainty is but if I intercept hundreds of messages from an al-Qaeda group planning a nuclear attack, further corroborated by other intelligence sources, then I'll be about as certain as is humanly possible. Your sophomoric blanket skepticism is no more convicning than any other consistent skeptic. You're right dude, we can't KNOW anything. But we know lots of things in this world.

Secondly: I find your continued focus on "the rights of one terrorist" to be offensive. It's surprising to me that someone who is "involved at a high level with the ACLU" would use such a crude formulation. Torture is a crime against humanity, like genocide.

Speaking of wankery. Gosh, aren't ALL crimes really crimes against humanity when you get down to it? But since "humanity" doesn't have a central nervous system, it doesn't count in the utility calculation.

There is no rason why you couldn't learn part of a plot without learning all of it. Its entirely plausible -- and you know it.

I don't. And by your own admission earlier in the thread, neither do you. You loaded the dice. For you to backpedal now really diminishes the crdibility of your argument.

I cam't understand why you insist on making this transparently godawfully bad argument or why you think I'm backpedaling. Clearly when the FBI gets a given piece of intelligence on some matter they are investigating, they don't get 100% of all relevant inforamtion in the first piece of intelligence they acquire. They get information in bits and pieces and build a file. Your argument is essentially that all the information always comes in one big package, which is such a bad argument you should be embarassed to have made it.