I’m sometimes amazed that there’s anyone who, with a straight face and a complete lack of shame, can condone or approve of torture.

It’s part of a package of things that ‘real’ and ‘serious’ politicians feel they must subscribe to once they’re in power and they take onto their shoulders the responsibility to protect every citizen in the country no matter what it takes or what it might cost.

In abandoning morality – in the form of approving of torture, or willingness to use information obtained under torture and being willing to erode rights we won under Magna Carta – they shift the blame onto us. It’s our fault. We must be protected, and whilst they themselves aren’t happy about it, they understand their solemn duty to protect.

Yet, really, I’m pretty sure the deal is that we expect them to protect us from, specifically, foreign threats and domestic criminals within reason and, preferably without actually making things worse or becoming a problem far bigger than the threat of terrorism.

And we’re grown up about this too. We assume that we’re not protected perfectly and that, sometimes, we’ll get lucky and there’ll be a positive intervention of some kind and that’s great.

Yet the truth is that our only real protection – such as it is – are the limits on the number of people who combine the desire, the motivation and the means to commit terrorist atrocities and then manage to go from inception to completion without anyone finding out or getting suspicious, without blowing themselves up prematurely or without simply doing it wrong.

Anti-terror efforts tend to concentrate on the means – find the bomb before it’s detonated, keep the information out of the public domain, limit the supply of potentially dangerous materials – and it’s in this murky territory that the pro-torture people lurk.

“What,” they ask, “about someone who knows where there’s a dirty bomb?” Or perhaps they muse about whether it’s okay to use information already obtained.

Yet these are the great hypothetical questions and they all reduce down to the ends justify the means and it’s how people have justified every repulsive crime, horror and abuse ever committed. It’s because of this, because you can justify anything that we need to be more careful in evaluating these things. Sure, these questions are never that simple, but where is the “greater good” here?

In truth no torturer begins an interrogation certain they will extract useful information (otherwise, duh, they wouldn’t need to be torturing someone). Nor can any information obtained ever be regarded as credible without being verified and checked by other means because, again, the source is an individual under duress. We don’t admit such evidence in court precisely because it has no measurable value.

People only get tortured because someone reckons an individual is guilty of something or might, one day, be guilty of something. Lacking actual proof of guilt, the only real hope is to cause them as much suffering as necessary until the consequences of confessing seem preferable to continued torture.

The basic problem is that we wouldn’t want to torture innocent people (and really once you’ve proven someone’s guilt then torture becomes an act of sheer sadism), and yet since the time of King John we’re all innocent until proven guilty.

It doesn’t say, “well, you know, unless they’re terror suspects, in which case better safe than sorry, what ho?”

I’m willing to live in a society that ignores information obtained via torture. The increased risk – if there even is an increase that could even be measured – is a price I’m willing to pay in order to protect the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” and deny Governments the power to use physical force and psychological warfare to extract confessions out of people. I tend to believe that is the greater good, that the overall amount of harm done is actually reduced.

Let’s call it the ‘Don’t be a dick’ school of politics and let’s save torture for those who really deserve it: Reality TV Producers and contestants… um.. no… wait…