You are very clearly begging the question here; not everyone agrees that use of torture 'cedes moral high ground', or that torture made the Germans, Japanese, or North Vietnamese 'bad'.[1]
There probably are a few assholes who don't, but to take it seriously outside the realm of a purely philosophical discussion on formal logic is something that no sane human being should even consider.
I don't care if Germans, Japanese, North Vietnamese or, for that matter, Americans were generally good or bad.
Not only are prisoners likely to confess anything that will make the pain stop, but the ones inflicting it are themselves unlikely to be able to tell when the one being tortured is telling the truth.
Furthermore, even if he tells the truth (as in information that he honestly believes to be true), it's very difficult to tell if that information is of real value or just another smoke screen -- i.e. if the man you're holding was intentionally misinformed by an enemy who became aware of his imminent capture, or who simply believe the risk of capture to be very high. History is full of cases where important plans have been withheld even from unit commanders, having been shared only with the highest political and military commanders. In such cases, field units aren't left without orders -- they're given inconsequentially fake ones.
Saying "torture would be OK in situations where the information obtained could save many lives" is basically like saying "living in the Sahara would be OK during rainy days". It's theoretically possible and it's obviously hard to disagree that you can live for 24 hours in a desert where it rains, but there's a good reason why no one is rushing to live in the Sahara.
My position is that I can imagine situations where I think torture is justified even though I see those situations as very unlikely to occur and even less likely to be judged correctly. I do agree that the history doesn't inspire optimism and that systemic torture use is a problem and it's a good battle to reduce it.
Your whole argoment falls apart from whenever direction you look at it.
My point is the chances that you know everything with certainty except x or y and all you need to do is torture this guy to find out x is alsmot never the case...are you ok with "we think this guy might know x, who we know is a bad guy, lets torture him to find out"
Let's for a second say it WAS the case, the proverbial ticking time bomb, do you propose tortureing innocents that may have tangential information that may prove useful but they are with holding I.e. Children, parents, siblings, friends?
By "the bomb goes off killin 243 people", you invoke hindsight. Ok, so now we're talking about how to best prevent an attack that kills 243 (or so) people, given we have a suspect in custody.
You seem to imply the answer is that our best chance of preventing the first bomb was to torture the person we at the time couldn't know was a terrorist. But maybe the best way would be to sweep for parked abandoned cars?
You do clearly illustrate why if you don't have oversight, institutions dealing with violent crime etc are likely to degenerate.