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Torture can never be justified

Torture is not just something we read about in an Edgar Allan Poe short story about the Spanish Inquisition. Though it has officially been outlawed by the UN and almost every country, that didn’t stop the CIA from waterboarding al-Qaida suspects during the War on Terror.

Of course, it’s easy to make a moral argument against inflicting pain to extract intelligence. As Barack Obama has said, torture "corrodes the character of a country". And its effectiveness is also highly questionable, as innocent prisoners will say anything their interrogators want them to in order to avoid further pain.

But there are those who say that terrorists have forfeited their right to humane imprisonment. They speak of the “ticking time bomb” scenario - what would you be prepared to do to a captive if you knew that they’d planted a nuclear bomb in Manhattan and you needed to find out where.