Torture Is Inhumane

But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been -- as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said -- that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.
~ from The illogic of the Torture Debate by Glenn Greenwald ~

I don't care if reliable information is received by torturing people. In my book, torturing other beings is wrong! It is inhumane and has no place in a civil society.

I have often heard people rationalize that the people we might torture would easily do it to us, if they had the opportunity. This line of reasoning doesn't move me at all. Who gives a damn if this is so? I want the society I live in to be more moral or ethical than that.

One of the sentiments that I try to keep in mind comes from Gandhi. He wrote that, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." If we succumb to the use of torture because other nations torture, we are no better than they are.