“Will a Torturer Be Allowed to Lead the C.I.A.?”

That’s the question posed in a headline atop an editorial in the New York Times, the “torturer” being the current deputy director of the CIA, Gina Haspel. President Trump wants her to lead the agency when its current director Mike Pompeo takes on a new role as secretary of state.

Here’s how the editorial explains it: “As an undercover C.I.A. officer, Ms. Haspel played a direct role in the agency’s ‘extraordinary rendition program,’ under which suspected militants were remanded to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.”

What the Times calls torture included waterboarding and in one case bashing a detainees head into walls and subjecting him “to other unspeakable brutalities.”

The Times, needless to say, is not alone in its opposition to waterboarding and “other unspeakable brutalities.”

To be clear, nothing you read here is a defense of bashing prisoners’ heads into walls. It’s not even a blanket defense of waterboarding. It is, however, an attempt to raise a few questions about the total and complete opposition, mainly but not entirely by progressives, to what is sometimes called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Let’s say that waterboarding a terrorist produced information that would save one innocent American life. Would opponents still oppose the practice? How about 10 lives? What if waterboarding a detainee produced information that would save 100 lives – or 1,000? Would waterboarding still be immoral?

What if enhanced interrogation encouraged a terrorist to talk about imminent plans to unleash a dirty (nuclear) bomb in the heart of a major American city? Should good decent people still oppose the practice?

Gina Haspel will become a piñata during her confirmation hearings. And it’s not only a majority of Democrats who will take shots at her.

Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, says, “I find it just amazing that anyone would consider having this woman at the head of the CIA.”

Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said that “The torture of detainees in U.S. custody during the last decade was one of the darkest chapters in American history,” adding that “Ms. Haspel needs to explain the nature and extent of her involvement in the CIA’s interrogation program during the confirmation process.”

Here’s what I hope Gina Haspel will tell her critics: “I oppose waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques 99 percent of the time. But if in rare cases waterboarding would save innocent American lives – if it would prevent a terrorist from setting off a dirty bomb in Times Square or downtown Chicago or anyplace else in our country – then, yes, I would consider using those enhanced techniques.”

We’re often told that waterboarding prisoners and employing other enhanced interrogation techniques simply don’t work – but more importantly, that they violate American values. When they go too far, if they’re used when other techniques haven’t been exhausted, then, yes, they do violate American values.

But what American values would we be upholding if, on grounds of morality, we didn’t employ some nasty interrogation techniques on terrorists and the result was a dirty bomb going off in the United States, resulting in numerous deaths?

While Gina Haspel, if she wants to head the CIA, will have to answer some tough questions, so should her opponents.