Good: Kidnapper is caught but unwilling to expose the location of the kidnapped, who might die in a very cruel way if not rescued in time.
Bad: Torturing locals for information while you are conquering their land for natural resources
Then, by observing that one of those happens only in movies, and the other one is common throughout human history and today, we can shorten it up:
Good: fictional
Bad: real
Just like there are good wars (obviously a defensive war has to be good), there are good tortures. Actually, since there are no absolutes, we should talk about useful and useless tortures instead
The most useful torturing is probably the worst - because of what torture is useful for: oppression through fear. That's what everyone who tortures uses it for - without exception. And no, your government is not going to be the first to not do that. (Consider the release of KSM's bogus, rambling, mentally damaged, tortured confession - it only makes sense if the purpose was to demonstrate to our enemies that we can make you say anything).
Sure it can get complicated, such is life. I hate when people bring up the reliability shit. Can't we decide AFTERWARD if it was reliable or not?
Of course not. You cannot untorture people. You cannot even start over, avoiding the consequences of having tortured. That means the entire arena is chock full of confirmation bias - the info you excluded by torture, including the informants you will now never see, etc, is not there to be compared. The benefits of never torturing are not there to be compared.
My point was about the reason to torture. If you do it for the wrong reason, it is bad
It's always done for bad reasons, if shortsighted and counterproductive sadism is a bad reason.
Example: We almsot certainly caught the Unabomber because we had no policy, at the time, of torturing terrorists or potential informants. His family fingered him, and only with the explicit guarantee of good treatment (for him: the idea of themselves beign tortured for information never occured to them - as it would have to, to anyone considering fingering an AQ honcho say). If we'd had a policy of waterboarding terrorism suspects and informants then, (and that is the perfect scene always brought up by torture apologists, catch him quickly before he kills again, time is pressing), he might still be out there - the investigators were nowhere near finding him.
Makign one's official law and military and the like odious and feared among decent people is a bad idea, on pragmatic grounds alone.