You’ll need a flight suit; one with a codpiece already installed will, I hear, be on sale after January of next year. Only problem… slight urine stain where the Depends leaked during the landing. You’ll hardly notice it.

Sadly, your accurate summation will be lost on the reality-impaired.

I think I’d ignore numerous warnings from foreign intelligence agents, stay on vacation for a month, sneer “Alright, you’ve covered your ass” when the CIA delivers a report on a potential attack, sit like a deer in the headlights for seven minutes reading a children’s book upon being told of the attack, fly around the country and hide for the day, and watch my Vice President stand down the USAF while more hijacked planes crashed. I’d allow the lead terrorist’s relatives to leave the country unquestioned because I was cronies with their country’s dictatorial ruler.
I’d make half-assed attempts to catch the terrorists, but then gin up a bullshit threat and divert most of my resources into invading a different country that had nothing to do with it, because I didn’t like their ruler.
I’d use the attack as an excuse to implement torture and massive warrantless spying on Americans and place myself and my Vice President above the law and exempt from any scrutiny or oversight in violation of the Constitution.
And if I were a Republican, masses of my party’s drooling followers like Mike would make excuses for all of my egregious screwups and I’d be wildly popular.

QrazyQat: Also a good answer.

I’d use the techniques the professional interregators use, not one which was designed to get false confessions (used for that purpose by the Spanish Inquisition, the Soviets, the witch trials, and so on). Hint: “24″ is not a documentary.

First, how do I know I have one of the gang, and how do I know their plans? How do I know I don’t have some crazy person, or someone who is trying to get me to massively mobilize resources, or panic an American city, with no more ability to enact an attack than my cat? Many similar thought experiments seem to postulate a sort of perfect knowledge that I find implausible. How is it that I’d have certainty that this was the guy who could tell me, yet not already know or be able to find out where they were planning to attack or have a more reliable way of getting the info?

Because, second, he might just lie to me under torture, and tell me what he figured I wanted to hear, and I might not end up saving anyone. In your scenario, I’d be torturing him to find out where they were planning on setting off a massive explosion somewhere. Had my prisoner told me there was a bomb somewhere, even in the World Trade Center, we’d have believed him and scrambled cops to search. Maybe he would have given me the names of innocents (perhaps enemies or rivals of his) as part of his cell, and we’d have spent time rounding them up and torturing them. But on Sept. 11, they’d have hijacked airplanes and crashed them. There was no bomb. Looking for a bomb in New York instead of hijackers in Boston could easily have been the result of your hypothetical torture session. The 9/11 technique took advantage of short flight times following the hijacking, and the assumption that hijackers wouldn’t kill themselves. Torture wouldn’t have helped us stop it. It might have made it worse.

Torture is NOT a “less polite means of extracting the information”, it’s a reprehensible, abusive means of inflicting pain and getting absolutely no trustworthy information whatever. The alternative is not to “simply hope for the best”, but to use more reliable interrogation methods, and other investigative techniques, while maintaining one’s membership in the ranks of civilized human beings.

Still, in the gedanken-welt where it would happen as you say, and if, despite the numerous reasons why it would be stupid and an enormous unreliable gamble, I found myself using waterboarding, then afterward I would expect to turn myself over to the legal authorities, confess, and be punished to the full extent of the law. I would know I was guilty of a crime, whatever my good intentions. In a system of laws, that has consequences. I would hope that, perhaps, serving my long sentence might help me expiate my shame and self-loathing for having committed such a heinous and illegal deed, no matter how many (if any) were saved. I might have gotten useful information, but I’d have had no way to know that I would, so there could be no way that it would forgive my motive in torturing my prisoner.

Torture is an immoral and illegal act. It is also remarkably unreliable. Various versions of the ‘ticking time bomb’ fantasy may enable some to blur their awareness of all that, but it is nonetheless true.

I would not ordinarily bother making all these arguments at length, since they should be obvious. Sadly, since so many insist on repeating a ‘time bomb’ justification, it is part of my patriotic duty to insist on knocking it down, every time I see it, for as long as it takes until we Americans regain our moral compass.

My point in #1 is that you can’t authorize torture becase there are bigots and sadists in positions of authortiy in police forces in any country who would think the authority to use ‘harsh’ techniques is a wink-nod request to do whatever - just don’t get caught with the body (or bodies). This mindset set the stage for the atrocities at Abu Gareb. You can not ever legalize torture. EVER!!!!

Regarding your hypothetical, which has never happened (but waterboarding has). If I was the police chief of a major city and I was certain I was in that situation, I would conduct torture myself knowing it might only cost me my job if I was right and I saved the city, and I would go to jail for a long time if I was wrong (and there was no bomb). You need to be that certain - and you have to be willing to take the hit personally. Otherwise torture will become a casual game played by sickos in uniforms.