Beating someone else up triggers primal instincts. Designing a spy satelite or using it's information doesn't.

There's motivated reasoning involving is assessing the information that you get by doing immoral things as high value.

Pretending that there are no revelant psychological effects from the torture on the person doing the torturing just indicates unfamiliarity with the arguments for the position that torture isn't effective.

I would add that that as far as the description of the battle of Midway in the comment goes, threating people with execution isn't something that in the US would be officially torture. Prosecutors in Texas do it all the time to get people to agree to plea bargains. It's disgusting but not on the same level as putting electrodes on someone's genitals. It also doesn't have the same effects on the people doing the threating as allowing them to inflict physical pain.

If you threaten someone with death unless he gives you information you also don't have the same problem of false information that someone will give you to make the pain stop immediately.

As far as the other example in that battle goes, the author of the comment doesn't even know whether torture was used and seems to think that there are no psychological tricks that you can play to get information in a short amount of time. Again an indication of not having read much about how interrogation works.

Here on Lesswrong we have AI players who get gatekeepers to let the AI go in two hours of text based communication. As far as I understand Eliezer did that feat without having professional grade training in interrogation. If you accept that's possible in two hours, do you really think that a professional can't get useful information from a prisioner in a few hours without using torture?