Torture Bad
Okay, listen up. Torture doesn't work. It is pure punishment culture of the worst kind. First of all, why would it work? Just think about it. You're hurting me. I have two options--1) do anything to make it stop, including lying my head off about anything you want to know or 2) shut down completely, in which case you might as well kill me now because I'm done.
You may get information, but you have no way to know that it's accurate. After all, you might be torturing someone WHO DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING!
What do I mean by punishment culture? Well, we're living in one. We're completely caught up in the idea that people doing wrong must know they're doing wrong (it's never enough just to Stop Doing Wrong Forever), that pain is important and inflicting it is 'tough,' that humane treatment is weak, and that the only reason anyone ever Does Good is because they're afraid they're going to be punished (you can see how well this last bit works by observing how few people are currently in our nation's jails, she said sarcastically).
Calpundit has a really excellent, passionate post on torture from a alightly different and critically important perspective:
...Alan Dershowitz, who has gotten a bunch of press lately for his suggestion that torture is sometimes permissible, uses as his basic example the "ticking bomb" scenario: if a bomb is about to go off and someone knows where it is, it's OK to torture the person in order to extract the information.This is profoundly wrong, and a perfect example of an intellectual being too clever for his own good. It's one of those situations where you need to turn off your higher intellect and just let your basic sense of right and wrong guide you.
Is it OK for a doctor to torture prisoners if the end result is a medical therapy that could save thousands? No.
Is it OK to torture a scientist's family in order to coerce him to work on an invention that could predict earthquakes and save millions? No.
Is torture ever OK in a decent society? No.
Still not sure? Just ask yourself this: would you be willing to perform the torture yourself? After all, it's easy and requires no technical skill. If you approve of torture but your answer is no, then you are a coward and a hypocrite. If your answer is yes, you are a barbarian. In either case, I don't want to know you.