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I'll just point out that you - not me - used the phrase "what you want to hear". Note that "what you want to hear" most is useful information. Please, you're on The Motte, just try to think logically about this rather than believing what you really hope to be true.
Just off the top of my head, suppose you have 5 suspects and you need the address of their base, and they're not talking. You torture them and they give you some addresses. Do you say "welp, a lot of these are false positives, shucks, into the garbage with you"? No, of course not. You can surveil all the addresses, you can correlate their stories, you can torture them more if it doesn't match up, etc. I'm making up an armchair scenario which doesn't come close to capturing the complexity of real-world intelligence work, but that's ok, because I'm not the one trying to make a sweeping claim. All it takes is one situation where torture works for your motivated reasoning to fall apart.
I'm sorry, but torture is a horrible practice that we shouldn't do, but it also works. It just does. If I had info I didn't want to reveal, it would work on me. It would work on you. This isn't a political question. It's a simple fact, and it's one that the average person just knows, because they haven't heard the "clever" contrarian arguments that let you talk yourself out of common sense.
You need to finish reading the sentence - "even if they have to make up what you want to hear". Interrogators do not have magical powers that can let them determine if information is useful or just useful-sounding. I have no doubt that a committed torturer could extract any kind of confession they wanted from me, even ones that aren't true. That's the entire problem with torture - you get an immense false positive rate that causes big problems for the reliability of information. Even your own hypothetical armchair scenario shows the flaw - if only one of your five suspects actually knows the location of the base or bomb that they've planted and the rest have to make it up, torture is worse than useless if you have any sort of time pressure or resource constraints.
Go back and point out the "motivated reasoning" in my post, and make sure that this reasoning would fall apart with a single potential counterexample - because I couldn't find that argument in my post. My actual point is that torture is a technique with limited effectiveness due to a high false positive rate, and your argument that you can account for a high rate of false positives by spending time and resources investigating them does not even rise to the level of a refutation of my point. Yes, if you spend more resources you can account for the problems of torture, but the fact that these problems can be compensated for with time and money does not mean that they do not exist. When you look at it in the context of modern intelligence-gathering capabilities, torture is so far down the list of effectiveness that it is barely even worth talking about. We live in surveillance states that engage in deep and sophisticated algorithmic profiling of every single citizen and a lot of them have live video monitoring of important places. It is largely impossible to engage in commercial transactions at scale without drawing the interest and attention of those surveillance bodies, and if we're going to say "fuck Civil Liberties, maximal effectiveness now" I highly doubt any torture would actually take place due to the impossibility of keeping enough information secret from the panopticon that has been constructed around us for it to even be worthwhile.
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