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I voted No, never. I think willravel is right that torture rarely, if ever, produces effective and useful information.
But more importantly, we shouldn't be torturing people because we're the United States of America. This country is losing moral capital like we have a leak in the bottom of the ethics barrel. I don't want anyone hurt, and that goes double for my fellow citizens and neighbors in the US. But there have to be limits on what we are willing to do. I truly think that the United States is supposed to be the beau ideal of civil/human rights. I'm not saying the United States ever actually has been that...just that I think it was created to strive for that. I think that torturing people goes against the spirit of the "certain inalienable rights" that Jefferson speaks of, and the ideals you can see in the correspondences between Jefferson and Adams, Jefferson and Madison, and John and Abigail Adams. I think a nation that presents itself as a bastion of freedom and democracy is not a nation that tortures. It's a nation that holds itself to a higher moral standard, despite the risks that doing so entails.
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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