Pledging Allegiance to Torture

What is being said, then, when one insists that torturing people is essential to "help keep the country safe?" 

I thought "keeping the country safe" is the business much more of the U.S. military than it is of a secret society like the C.I.A. with its never disclosed budget and  its taste for conducting interrogations far out of sight of the public eye and accompanied by torture.

If that's not true, then what has been the purpose of funneling all those astronomical amounts of money to the military?.  

Unlike the C.I.A. the costs of the military appear to be on record, generally speaking, though there are some "black' areas there, too.  But at least it's clear that the taxpayers have to cough up hundreds of billions of hard-earned dollars for the "defence" mechanism each year.   (How many can remember when that establishment was much more honestly called the "War Department?")

   So what is really being said here, then, by those who would tolerate torture? That despite those enormous costs the military can't really "keep the country safe" all on its own, and instead all those expensive planes, ships, trucks,  and other assorted candidates for the military junkyards are mainly to furnish endless fuel-wasting joyrides for  young people in uniform, along with perfecting their art of  the fast draw, though there the combat methods of choice appear to be  focusing much more  on  assassinations from afar,  by  the decidedly non-courageous use of  implements such as guided missiles, sniper rifles, and drones?    Is it saying that instead we have to make it our business to go overseas, kidnap the citizens of other people's countries, pack them into prisons, and submit them to grossly wrong processes of humiliation and extreme pain, through torture?   Are they saying that if it could just as well be asserted that eating ice cream flavored with cat feces, or carpet-bombing cities such as Paris out of existence, or mass rape regardless of gender or age would "keep the country safe," then such processes, to which torture compares in its horror, are justified and ought to be employed?  

If such acts were necessary, then it would mean that no country could be kept safe from what such acts would suggest as being the worst danger of all -- itself -- and it would mean that in their assertions the defenders of torture are actually saying some highly uncomplimentary things about a nation when its well-being would in that way need to be secured.

I had thought that when we saluted the American flag every morning in grade school (without, also in an earlier day, pulling God into it) , we were having inculcated in us and we were promising to each other the certainty, among other things, that never subsequently in our lifetimes and definitely not on our behalf would we hear of torture being employed or that we would permit its use. 

 But in such ways can one generation betray another.