is the use of torture ever justified in dealing with criminals and terrorists?

i feel that whether it can be justified depends on the situation.
in the case when the criminal has very important information that could save many lives but he refuses to say, torture can then be justified.
in the case when the criminal really has no clue about what we want to know, toture would then be unjustified.
however, when would we know whether the criminal has any clue at all?

for example the 9/11 incident. from the article, they mentioned, "but then think of 9/11, of the awful carnage and a nation's broken heart, and as your slide down the slippery slope, their screams(screams from the terrorists) may start to sound more like justice." torture is something that is inhumane, but if it is able to save lives, we may have secound thoughts whether it is really inhumane. another example would be the German case of September 2002, involving the kidnapping and murder of 11-year-old Jakob von Metzler, and the threatening by the police of his kidnapper with torture. (Three days after Metzler's kidnapping, police watched a man collect the ransom and arrested him. The suspect toyed with his interrogators about the location of the boy and the police chief allowed his officers, in a written order, to torture. After he was threatened with pain, it took only 10 minutes for the suspect to reveal the location of the boy, who was already dead.) thus torture can be justifiable in this extreme cases.

according to the article, "it is morally prohibited, and it is also against international laws. when they pull out his fingernail and he doesnt say anything, do they find his child and start torturing the child?" It's very rare when you have this perfect situation where you know that a particular prisoner has information that's immediately useful. Torture turns out to be routinely unproductive. In domestic laws, we forbid confessions under duress in part because they almost never get to the truth. That same knowledge should be applied to our international conflicts. It demonstrates a huge lack of creativity and imagination in our intelligence agencies when they resort to torture. It goes very quickly to the abuse that was seen at Abu Ghraib. The interrogators wanted the prison guards to "soften up" the detainees, whether or not they knew anything. It's a very dangerous process.

thus torture CAN be justified in dealing with criminals and terrorists ONLY in certain cases.