*cough* … no, seriously. let them whip each other senseless.
just ask for permission first, mmmmkay?

Applying the principle of proportionality–the expected harm must not be disproportionate to the expected benefit–you’d need a very extreme situation (the 24 scenario) to be able to justify torture, not just because of the immediate harm done by the torture itself, but also because of the broader and longer-term harm done to your cause by using torture. See this lecture by Alberto Mora, former US Navy General Counsel.

In any case, there’s absolute prohibitions against torture. In the Western military tradition, it’s generally accepted that you have to draw the line somewhere, that during wartime moral constraints don’t get thrown out the window entirely. Since the late 19th century, this has been codified in the Geneva Conventions: basically, you have to protect non-combatants, including civilians as well as soldiers who surrender or are captured. You can’t torture them, rape them, summarily execute them, starve them, or work them to death.

In the United States, cruel and unusual punishment is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

Though gerryblog’s pretty much said it all.

Yeah; although there’s clearly a contemporary US policy angle to the question, this doesn’t need to be considered solely in that context. The question of torture certainly predates (and will undoubtedly post-date) current events.

It would never be appropriate for torture to have legal status, i.e., you can’t codify torture under any circumstances. That’s opening a gate to hell.

In some totally unlikely hypothetical scenario, it might be best if Jack Bauer *breaks* the law against torture to gain some immediate information that is necessary to find the terrorists’ hidden Doomsday device because that’s the Only Way and Time Is Running Out. However, the correct response here is prosecutorial discretion not to bring the case to trial, or else a pardon—you don’t give this behavior the stamp of approval in advance because, again, you’re opening a gate to hell in which torturous interrogation becomes standard operating procedure. (This is how shows like 24 used to handle the torture issue, by the way; it’s only in the last few years that the American right’s fetishization of torture has raised the possibility that torture could be somehow legal or justified in and of itself.)

However, the real answer is that an interrogator who cared about the truth would never use torture anyway. Torture isn’t designed to extract reliable or actionable information, it’s designed to extract confessions. There was just a good post about this at <a href=”http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/12/what_doesnt_work_about_torture.php”Matt Yglesias’s place the other day. The victim of torture will say anything to make it stop—that’s what torture is designed for—which means you can’t trust any of the information it gives you, and in particular the torturer will generally hear the thing the tortured thinks the torturer want to hear, not something that’s actually true.

Information, once gained, has no emotions attached in my opinion. Certainly every effort to stop unethical or immoral methods of gaining that information should be made, but once it exists, it should be put to use.

If you bought a house and found out it was the site of a murder, do you destroy the house so that no one is tainted by the events of the past?