There are, seems to me, two separate objections that can be made to the use of torture to induce confessions:

1. Of course, the humanitarian reason. This needs no elaboration.

2. The practical legal reason, that whatever response is obtained is AT LEAST questionable. Thus the use of torture is at least partly a means of extorting a desired answer as opposed to a true answer. And unless the answer that comes forth can be strongly corroborated from independent sources, it cannot be trusted.

But they have to be independent sources, not led to by the "confession" extracted. There is a doctrine in the law called "the fruit of the poisoned tree". The idea is that anything that grows out of a "poisoned" source must be rejected, even if the same facts would have been fine if they had been arrived at independently. This is intended to discourage illegitimate means of acquiring evidence.

Thus, torture as a means of getting evidence is not only wrong but (if the matter is handled correctly) ineffective.

All of that is in the legal realm. In a military application, only the humanitarian argument against torture retains its full strength (and I want you to know that I consider that sufficient). The exigencies of war tend (note I said "tend") to trump the second argument. Even so, and even for warlike purposes, the possible unreliability of torture-induced information makes its use dangerous.

Dave Oesterreich