It never prevented earthquakes or brought the rain, but it made people feel better because they were doing something to address the problem.

We are now more civilized. We practice symbolic human sacrifice. Catholics, for example, call it the Eucharist, and incorporate it into the Mass.

Some information gotten as a result of torture has been correct. A great deal of it has been ravings of those deranged by pain, or lies told to make the pain stop. But it makes people feel better because someone is doing something to address the problem.

The more important question here is, when we practice torture, what does this make us and what happens to our community?

In the paper "A Consequentialist Argument Against Torture Interrogation of Terrorists" presented at the Joint Services Conference on Professional Ethics (January 30-31, 2003), Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo observes:

Even under the Nazis, torture interrogation failed to break dozens of high state officials and military commanders involved in late-war plots to assassinate Hitler. According to Peter Hoffman’s History of the German Resistance: 1933-1945:[27]

Six months from the start of their investigations the Gestapo still had nothing like precise knowledge of the resistance movement.......This lack of information and knowledge is all the more astounding in that Himmler's men employed every means to extract confessions.... Moreover all forms of torture were used without hesitation....

Hoffman attributes the failure of the Gestapo to the “fortitude of their victims.”

Closer to home for Americans, during the months and years of North Vietnamese torture of American POWs, Commander James Stockdale estimated that under 5% of his 400 fellow American airmen succumbed to North Vietnamese demands for anti-American propaganda statements.[28] These examples expose the bigotry in the expectation that key enemy terrorists will readily give up their plans and associates under torture.

You may find the rest of the paper enlightening. In it, the author discusses several types of torture, including probable scenarios and institutional requirements. The concluding three paragraphs read:

The individual law enforcement officials, of course, can make their own moral choices and take their own risks. But if it is state policy to torture the terrorist, then the policy should be rational and the torture interrogation proceed with a reasonable chance of success.

Terrorists selected for such a role—like most American POWs in North Vietnam—can probably stand up to commonplace tortures from untrained staff for a long time. The use of sophisticated techniques by a trained staff entails the problematic institutional arrangements I have laid out: physician assistance; cutting edge, secret biomedical research for torture techniques unknown to the terrorist organization and tailored to the individual captive for swift effect; well trained torturers, quickly accessible at major locations; pre-arranged permission from the courts because of the urgency; rejection of independent monitoring due to security issues; and so on. These institutional arrangements will have to be in place, with all their unintended and accumulating consequences. Then the terrorists themselves must be detected while letting pass without torture a thousand other criminal suspects or dissidents, that is, avoiding a dragnet interrogation policy.

The moral error in reasoning from in the ticking bomb scenario arises from weighing the harm to the guilty terrorist against the harm to the prospective innocent victims. Instead, the harm to innocent terrorist victims should be weighed against the breakdown of key social institutions and the state-sponsored torture of many innocents. Stated most starkly, the damaging social consequences of a program of torture interrogation evolve from institutional dynamics that are independent of the original moral rationale.