I believe this scenario is misleading because it does ignore the negative consequences of allowing torture. The way you describe it there seem to be two possible scenarios - 1. forbid torturing the terrorist and let innocent people die or 2. torture the terrorist and save innocent people. I believe this is not what happens in real life. The real decision is either 1. authorities are never allowed to torture anyone and some innocent people whose deaths could be prevented die and 2. authorities are allowed to torture terrorist suspects and they will abuse this power to achieve what they want by torturing people they know are innocent and claiming they were suspects. As someone who grew up in a totalitarian country I am inclined to believe that real 2 does more harm to society than real 1.

This might happen in some (arguably extremely rare) cases, but you know that's the narrative that will be used every time it will be somewhat convenient to torture someone.

And if you torture him and he doesn't really know and he just feeds you some lies just so you will stop torturing him and you follow wrong info and cannot stop the incident. But if you didn't follow his lies you might have followed some other leads and stopped the attack.

Ok, so by "terrorist" I assume you mean someone who's technically innocent, because you have no proof of a crime?

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.

thr more likely scenario would be: "...a [suspected] terrorist is captured and you have to put a stop to [an unkown but potential] operation. [a] cell [he is thought to be affiliated with may] kill a hundred or so people in the next month...."

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?

You fire half your detectives fpr incompetence. You know how hard is to procure even rudimentary explosives without leaving a trail?