We as a society are asking some existential questions regarding a timely topic, that of torture, it's efficacy, and what might be the moral implications of torture as policy to a nation or to a society.
First, in regards to the efficacy of torture:
People in a position to know all agree that torture does not work, it has never worked. People undergoing torture will say anything at all to end the torture experience. People being tortured will tell the torturer what they think the torturer wants to hear. Information obtained via torture is notoriously unreliable.
The best ways of eliciting quality intelligence from any detainee or suspect never involves torture according to people that are in the business of successful debriefings. But even if torture did 'work' (it clearly does not) to do so happens to be a felony. It is a war crime as defined by the Geneva Conventions, to which the US is signatory.
To be very specific here, what happened during the prior 8 years was that some very dangerous thresholds were crossed. This is where the moral implications become evident. Use of torture by a society has a toxic effect upon the entire society. This is a threshold that once crossed, becomes difficult to backwalk. In the case of these 'terrorists' (and I'll bracket that word a bit because these detainees have not been charged with any crime), at Guantanamo Bay, Abu-Ghraib, and Bagram air base in Afghanistan, they were tortured repeatedly. Not only that, these activities are hugely counterproductive. The logical and rational approach to these people would be to demonstrate respect for them as individuals. To do otherwise is to enrage the native populations of those nations from which these detainees were extracted. Furthermore, if these people didn't have a negative opinion of the US going in, I promise you they have an extremely negative opinion of the US going out. Then there's the issue of 'mission creep'. Once established and accepted, the historical pattern is that this sort of thing will metastasize to infect local law enforcement against average citizens over time. Because you've forfeited the moral objection, you have no moral justification to oppose it in any other circumstance, especially if people believe it 'works'. Supporters of torture have no idea what kind of Pandora's box this move represents.
What the prior regime DID was to take procedures developed by the armed services when they reverse engineered techniques devised by the Chi-coms of North Korea (DPRK) and the Wehrmacht of Adolf Hitler, in order to demonstrate these techniques in a controlled environment so as to prepare members of Navy SEALS and Army Special Forces for that eventuality in case of enemy capture. This is what is called S.E.R.E. training, (survival, evasion, resistance, escape). It's important to note here that these techniques were DESIGNED to produce FALSE confessions.. That was indeed the point with these organizations. They were after false confessions that could be exploited for political propaganda purposes. So lets for a moment consider the implications of this. Our government of the last prior 8 years used an interrogation via torture system that was designed to elicit false confession. Analysts agree the whole point of all this was not to prevent any attacks, but to backfill their own lack of any evidence to support a rationale for a US military invasion of Iraq, specifically, interrogators persistently demanded information pertaining to a non-existent link between Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. As more and more information becomes available in this still breaking story, it becomes increasingly chilling. Because if indeed you truly are interested in preventing some future attack or locating a terrorist, why would you employ techniques that by their very nature were designed to produce a false confession?
This is the United States of America. The United States of America has since its founding rejected torture, or even onerous treatment of political prisoners or prisoners of war. This tradition dates back to George Washington, one of the Founders. If as a nation, you have a history of treating POWs humanely, then when your soldiers are captured, it's more likely that THEY will be treated humanely. These policies speak to who we are as a nation. The country I was born into and grew up in does not torture anyone ever. This isn't complicated, but those nations that embrace the use of torture pay a huge price.
We live in dangerous times and it's a dangerous planet. Some citizens hold an unrealistic and quite frankly dangerous expectation that government can guarantee individual physical safety. Lately, it's become fashionable for US Presidents to declare that their number one job is to guarantee the safety of US Citizens. I can assure you no government entity has the capacity to do that. Indeed, the Presidential oath of office says nothing about protecting citizens. The oath of office demands that the office holder "....preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." It's the Constitution that requires protection, not the citizenry. We have an army if we're invaded. Committing extreme violence to the rights and guarantees of the US Constitution is far more troubling than any random episodes of terrorism. 50,000 people die every year in traffic accidents but we don't declare a war on highways. I think a sense of perspective is indicated.