Seagoon, while I certainly applaud your desire to quickly usher these folks into the afterlife (following applicable due process, of course), it is puzzling why inflicting a significantly lesser harm on them in order to obtain information that could save innocent lives is unacceptable from either a legal, practical or moral perspective.
Legally, I really question whether existing "laws of warfare" should apply to conflicts with stateless terrorist organizations, since they all either apparently presuppose a conventional "war" to which the actions of unlawful combatants (guerillas, partisans, etc) are ancillary, or a civil war or rebellion which has ultimately legitimate goals (the seizure of political power in a polity). The conflict with Islamic terrorism (whose goal is forced religious conversion brought about by maximum civilian death) is more like the 18th-19th century campaigns against piracy and the slave trade than a war between nations. I would therefore submit that the purely "legal" bases for refraining from torture (the laws of war) should have no applicablility to this conflict.
On a practical basis, a strong argument can be made that the nature of this conflict and the nature of the adversary may require the use of a level of coercion (torture, if you will) which would not be necessary in any type of conventional war or struggle for political power.
In a conventional conflict, information obtained from torturing individual prisoners is unlikely to be strategically decisive (unless you captured the head of state or similar high ranking person, which almost never happens in modern conflict until hostilities have almost ceased). While such information might be tactically or operationally valuable, there are always alternative sources for tactical and operational intelligence. When dealing with an anonymous, multinational organization with no geographical location and no physical existence outside the persons who comprise its members, there literally may be absolutely NO alternative source for strategically decisive information that is needed to conduct this conflict effectively. I do not know this to be a fact, but I can imagine that it may well be true.
The most powerful practical argument against the use of torture in warfare between nation states is reciprocity (i.e., if we do it to our prisoners they will do it to theirs). However, this argument carries no weight in this situation. Anyone, military or civilian, captured by Islamic terrorists can expect a gruesome, painful and public death, frequently followed by the desecration of their corpse, all under the guise of religious sanction. Nothing we do, or refrain from doing, is likely to impact this conduct or protect anyone from it.
Purely moral concerns remain to be addressed. Interestingly, if there is no specific biblical indorsement of torture, no one seems to cite any specific biblical prohibition of it. In the absence of such clear guidance, if it is permissible to kill someone outright in a "just war", by what calculus is it morally less justifiable to apply physical harm short of death (indeed, in the current case, short even of permanent physical injury) if it is absolutely necessary to obtain information required to conduct that war?
The only moral argument that I've been able to discern is that torture is perceived as somehow more morally corrosive or corrupting than outright killing. This is difficult to accept, particularly since modern warfare relies on technologically advanced, remote control killing, where the enemy are seen as just bright blobs in a thermal sight and films of "good kills" circulate on the internet. It seems far more likely, and more frightening, that an individual, or a society, can become inured to, and ultimately addicted, to videogame warfare than to the messiness of coercive interrogation.
All this is not to say that I believe in torture for its own sake, for revenge for punishment, or if there is any reasonable alternative. If, however, there is absolutely no alternative to obtain strategically decisive information, then it seems to me justified on any reasonable legal, practical and moral grounds.
My apologies to all for the length of this post, but how the Western world conducts this current conflict, and whether we ultimately prevail, is vital to the future of all of us and of our children. It bears discussion, here and elsewhere.
