Do you think that waterboarding and other stress techiques should be applied when the US domestic police pick people up for crimes?
For very few rare cases where it can lead to aquiring life saving intelligence, yes.
Example 1: A man was caught on tape kidnapping a little girl. He is caught, but the girl is nowhere to be found. He admits to having kidnapped and raped her and goads the police with "you will never find her in time". Torturing such a person can lead to her location, and finding her "in time".
Example 2: A man is arrested for terrorist activity, he admits to having placed bombs with a timer set to go off at a certain time, he will not reveal their exact location. Torture could reveal those and save lives.
I don't really see that much of a big difference between the two. You assume that the person you are "questioning" knows something in intelligence and then you want a confession. It's one and the same.
You don't see any difference? either you are liar or a moron. Torturing a confession out of someone and intelligence out of someone are entirely different. "I am a terrorist" and "I have set a car bomb in this intersection in a blue sedan with this licence plate set to go off at this time" are completely different. The first is unverifiable and could be false. The latter you can send someone to verify if true or false confession AND it will save lives if it is true.
Torture violates everything, every single value the United States used to stand for. Freedom, Justice, Equality. Saying that those who comitted the crimes weren't falling into the category of humans that deserve to be treated according to those values puts you in the same category with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and every other dictator that ordered millions to be killed. There is no proper use of torture.
There are a lot of things that violate those values, torture is not one of them.
Freedom... So prison and the death penalty are fine, but torture suddenly violates freedom?
How is justice violated by torture? Justice stands for "revenge", torture is the epitome of justice. I actually oppose justice because it focuses on punishing instead of protecting. Justice for example, means no second chances, and I believe in second chances.
Equality... If torture is applied without preference to gender, race or creed... based solely on a person's actions (ex: committing acts of terrorism) than equality is not compromised.
Now don't get me wrong... torture violates a LOT of things... Freedom, justice and equality are not those things.
I realize that the need to save lives can clash with nice sounding moral values that do not help you in the real world - but how far are you willing to go to preserve your ideals? The end does not always justify the means.
The end indeed does not always justify the means, it rarely does, but in this case it does. How far will you go for you conviction? how many people you will sentence to die because you were too squeamish to do what had to be done to save them from murderous scum.