...and it therefore is a very effective argument for torture.
It is also an excellent illustration of why we cannot base our laws on gut reactions, however widely shared.
First and foremost it is a moral issue. Torture is wrong, period. We risk becoming that which we hate by engaging in it.
Second, torture is ineffective. The person undergoing torture is likely to say what the torturer wants to hear, in order to make it stop. Even if the torture victim is someone who really knows something, interrogation experts have told us they have more effective means than torture for extracting useful information.
Third, because there are more effective means of extracting information than torture, that shows that the true intent of torture is punishment. Now this may provide a certain satisfaction to the torturers and by proxy, to you and me, as a sop to our grieved souls. But then again, we do not see the actual torture being performed. We do not think about the fact that innocent people, or people without useful knowledge, are also tortured in our names. We do not understand that the torturer enjoys his craft, and that we create monsters among us in order to carry out these methods.
That is why our laws must proscribe certain things, such as vigilante justice that people might find satisfying in the moment, and then later it turns out they got the wrong guy -- even though the vigilantes might regret it later, he's still dead. In the case of torture, there are few arguments for it other than it is satisfying to get even with the perpetrators of horrific acts. It is known by expert interrogators to be less effective than other methods. It is morally wrong. Our laws MUST continue to always and unequivocally proscribe torture.
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