My comment was in response to the "torture = bad" part of the parent comment, not an attempt to justify using detainees to practice your torture techniques.

He was also tortured in a "regular" way on a basis of being relative. And he is still tortured - what else do you want to call keeping him in for so many years without charges and trial. Any way you spin it it is sick. And what good did it do? Care to share accounts of people saved from an imminent death by torturing this guy?

These kinds of conversations always devolve.

"Torture is bad and should be abolished".

"Well, what about this other, very contrived situation where it's good?"

You can use that non-sequitur to justify literally anything. "Murder, slavery and rape is bad". "Well, what about this situation where it did good?"

That's why law is hard. Even the contrived situations occur.

No. There is no "difficult moral conundrum" about torture, nor slavery, nor rape, nor genocide.

There are only people who inexplicably insist that a tortured non-sequitur is a pro-torture counterfactual.

That's one viewpoint. In some situations, it allows innocent people to die in large numbers. That's part of the moral situation too. Ignoring it, insisting it's all black-and-white, is easy from an armchair.