Victory at all costs?

Bryan Cones at US Catholic has a post about Zero Dark Thirty and torture. Here's a bit of it ...

[...] Regardless of the alleged "success" of the U.S. torture regime, can the ends justify the means? Setting aside how many people were tortured "unjustly"--because, for example, they were detained for no reason or were simply innocent of involvement in terrorism--I can see no way a Catholic--or a Christian for that matter--can tolerate the deliberate infliction of pain on another human being for the sole purpose of extracting information--not even to save other people, much less kill someone else. On one level, this is a simple matter of church teaching--the U.S. bishops have a study guide on the topic simply titled, "Torture is an instrinsic evil." Even more, given the fact that Jesus himself was a victim of state torture ...

I agree with Bryan that torture isn't acceptable, even to save lives ... it seems to me that once you start using the tactics of those you oppose *because* of their tactics, in principle you've lost the war. You don't have to be a Catholic or even a Christian to believe this, though - I felt the same way about torture when I was an atheist.