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First, the practical. You say that even bits and pieces derived from soldiers who know nothing but their orders will help resolve a greater strategy. Now, the terrorists that take up arms have no greater strategy. They desire only to sow chaos. Even if you were to torture them, anything you get could not be trusted. If you threaten them with their lives and excruciating pain for information they don't have, they are forced to make something up. If they do know something, they might lie anyway, since they know they're going to end up dead, and as long as it ends the pain they'll say anything regardless of validity.
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You look at 9/11 and can still say the terrorists have no greater strategies? If we caught one terrorist he'd have to know SOMETHING about what he was trying to do. Even if he doesn't know the greater plan, if we can get him to divulge what he was ordered to do we could figure out a general outline and get much closer to prevention.
And they normally don't end up dead, and we can thank the ACLU for that. It's like, it's ok if we kill them on the battlefield, but if we take one and then get information why don't we just give him back? I don't agree with killing the terrorist and I'd rather just have him chill in jail for a long time, but still... ACLU can be ridiculous at times, despite the fact that I agree with them most of the time.
As for your two quotes at the bottom there, you're throwing things into black and white when they're really(at least with me) not. Just because we use an eye for an eye in some places doesn't mean we're required to to it everywhere. Their mission is to sow discord and killing civilians seems to be the best way of doing that. Our mission is to eliminate the terrorists completely. Are unrelated civilians anywhere in our mission? No. So that's unnecessarily cruel, especially since it gets us nowhere anyway because the terrorists use them as human shields at times. They obviously don't care about civilians.
Killing civilians advances their goals, while it would do nothing for us. Torture for the sake of information extraction advances their goals, while it also can advance ours. We give them an advantage by not doing the same in that situation.