Your sentence bolded above may very well be true but still have no relevance to George Washington and his opinions on the subject. Yes, military people have been using it since... forever. Doesn't mean that George Washington did, nor does it mean that he thought it was a good idea.
I have read the Washington speech and he was telling his soldiers that they couldn't simply beat captured enemy soldiers to death with sticks because they were captured and happen to be the enemy. Misinterpreting history doesn't change the fact of history. He said nothing about using torture to extract valuable information in order to save a large number of lives. Spies, traitors and all covert operators were not then, and are not now given the courtesy that soldiers were expected to give each other after the battle was over.
Linclon, who wrote of his admiration and respect for George Washington, and who is himself considered to be the very father of civil rights suspended Habeus corpus and with the help of a secret police bureaucracy operated by William Seward, imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political opponents. They were thrown into gulags such as Fort Lafayette in New York harbor where they were never charged, had no idea how long they would be held, and their families often had no idea of their whereabouts until such time as they were released or their bodies were sent home.
The Lincoln administration, which saw enemies everywhere, labeled virtually anyone who disagreed with its policies as spies and traitors who were therefore subject to military arrest and indefinite imprisonment without due process.
The Lincoln administration also tortured Northern prisoners, as documented by Mark Neely, Jr. in his book,
The Fate of Liberty. In a chapter titled "The Dark Side of the Civil War" Neely includes a lengthy section called "Torture", and describes some of the techniques used by the Lincoln administration. He describes torture as a means of extracting confessions" not of Southerners but of Northerners suspected of deserting from the United States Army into which many of them had been drafted. (p. 109). Handcuffs and hanging by the wrists were rare, he says, but the army had developed a water torture that came to be used routinely. When this practice became public knowledge, there was no outcry to correct the abuse, no one in the administration saw it as an abuse. It had become a usual and customary way of handling certain kinds of prisoners.
Lincoln essentially declared himself dictator and proceeded to launch a war without the consent of Congress, he suspend habeas corpus, shut down over 300 opposition newspapers, imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political opponents, including numerous newspaper editors and owners, deported an outspoken Democratic congressman, Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, censored the telegraph, confiscated private property, confiscated firearms in the border states, imprisoned duly elected members of the Maryland legislature, the mayor of Baltimore, and Congressman Henry May of Baltimore, instructed soldiers to rig Northern elections, and generally ignoreed all constitutional restrictions on executive powers.
Lincoln understood that the very nation was at stake and did what was necessary to win.
The first thing to do is to make a firm committment to never using torture and then organizing your life in such a fashion that you don't need to. Then an intelligent person or group of people would work to prevent the dire situation from developing in the first place, so that they didn't get backed into a corner where they had no good options. What is called for is "forethought".
Fine plot for a series of movies, or books, but we are human beings and can't possibly stop everyone every time.
I understand. You would stand by and see a million die before you would torture one or two who have tested positive for handling the material that you are looking for and bask in your own self righteousness in the aftermath, and to hell with those who died and those they left behind.
