Late to the party on responding to this thread but just have to say that I agree with you 100%. I actually wrote about this a bit for a blog that I kept at Uni (mostly for my own entertainment / alleviation of boredom) and found his position shockingly ill-informed.

It's like he's very desperate to be seen as a liberal person, but his position on torture is way to the right of even people like Alan Dershowitz or Charles Krauthammer. I do very strongly disagree with both of those people on torture, but they are both at least thoughtful people who have considered their positions and have arguments that carry intellectual weight. Harris' position is very much an attempt to toe the line between appearing hesitant about torture, whilst actually advocating for an extremely broad and unrestrictive policy that would, in practise, see many innocent people being tortured.

His argument rests entirely on the ticking bomb scenario, and is essentially a more verbose and pompous version of one of those opposite-of-thought thinkpieces that introduce the scenario and then say something along the lines of "the war on terror has made it so we are now always living in a ticking bomb scenario". The time bomb scenario is an abstract ethical scenario - it is entirely possible for someone to say that torture would be permissible in such an exaggerated scenario (which relies on stuff like the authorities having perfect information, the torture working, not being fed incorrect information, etc.) and to still oppose torture in all real-world circumstances as a matter of ethics and policy. Sam Harris doesn't do this - he says that the time bomb scenario provides a potential justification for torture, and then goes on to name specific individuals in the war on terror who should be tortured, like KSM, despite his policy prescriptions bearing no resemblance to reality. He also doesn't seem to realise that saying officers should be prepared to flout international law and torture despite its illegality is actually worse, since it just renders illegality meaningless. This is not the well-considered opinion of someone with intellectual and moral seriousness. It is a knee-jerk right-wing advocacy of extreme barbarism without any consideration for why it is illegal under international law. I would bet a large amount of money that Sam Harris has read little further than the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on torture (which he is fond of citing) and hasn't even bothered to familiarise himself with the wider literature on torture or seminal court judgments that describe in detail the kinds of interrogation his policy proposal would advocate and which also expand on the reasons why it's so strongly outlawed. He makes no reference to them and this is why I think he thinks he holds the claim of being "the only person who has argued for the ethical necessity of torture" - any undergraduate comes upon the realisation that it's pretty much impossible to form a genuinely original argument - there's just too much literature out there that someone will have broadly advocated for the same opinion you have. Harris is just so ill-informed and poorly-read that he thinks his positions are novel.