Torture doesn't work, its self defeating as they will make up any story to end it. It also puts our soldiers in danger.
This is frequently used as an excuse, and is largely BS.
Its going to be a VERY rare occurance that we torture someone, they tell us Osama Bin Dodo is in KungpowChickenistan village and our instant response is to nuke it, or send in soldiers, with the outcome being we nuked an innocent village made entirely of schools and 10k children, or a massive battalion of soldiers gets slaughtered.
The realistic outcome is, torture, get a bit of intel, a location or a name, use that location or name to START an investigation into whats going on there, and potentially find something useful some tangible information the inteligence services gather themselves which could then lead on to some kind of action, surveillance, assault, bombing, whatever.
If the intel someone gives gives up a location they look into and find its old intel, purposefully misleading, or nothing there, they go back and ask for more intel, or if the intel was good, say a location, which they check out and find a group of dodgey looking people with ak's, they get pictures, go back and he puts names to pictures, which again they can check out.
I have no idea why people think its goes torture> full on assault on any information without any checking whatsoever.
Torture almost certainly works, the only question is knowing who to torture.
I think there should be limits, if we clean out a hostile cave which is full to the brim of weapons and guy shooting at us, and we take a guy hostage and interogate the crap out of him, I think his guilt is all but certain.
Taking random guys off the street, checking their houses, finding nothing, but torturing them because they go to a mosque where a known terrorist has been, or because they said something extremist like on a forum, etc, etc, is WAY over board.
If we go around torturing people we really really think are terrorists, but have no proof, well, theres no way at least one person won't be completely innocent.
Pretending torturing doesn't happen is stupid, taking it out in the open and putting some very strict guidelines in place and agreeing on a "level of guilt" to establish before proceeding is something that would help prevent random dude being plucked off the street and being put in a prison and tortured for 5 years, having done nothing wrong.
