&quot;If you&#x27;re not willing to sacrifice real lives and safety to avoid torture, I don&#x27;t think you are meaningfully against it&quot;<p>I completely agree with this, and it&#x27;s the crux of the argument that I&#x27;ve made against torture when having that debate with people.<p>Whether it works or not is a cop out.  Yes, I believe that torture is, in general, vastly counterproductive.  But I also believe that there might be occasional cases where it happens to &quot;work&quot; for extracting factually true information (I put &quot;work&quot; in scare-quotes because there are all sorts of practical and moral side effects even if it does &quot;work&quot;).  No matter:  it&#x27;s still morally wrong.<p>Most Americans believe in the principle of &quot;innocent until proven guilty.&quot;  That alone should be enough to imply that torture is wrong, since it is almost exclusively perpetrated against the unconvicted (and even if convicted, there&#x27;s the whole prohibition on &quot;cruel and unusual punishment,&quot; which I&#x27;d bet most Americans would also claim belief in).<p>I guess there are many people who don&#x27;t think it through that far.  And I&#x27;d bet that there are many Americans who believe that those rights apply to other Americans, but not non-Americans, or enemy combatants, or whatever.  Such people are, IMHO, cowardly assholes.  Everyone deserves the same basic human rights.