Jack roughs up a terrorist or captive suspect solely to obtain information to act on personally, or in situations where the information needs no provenance. He (or CTU) is never concerned with the disposition or punishment or prosecution of the terrorists, only in stopping the next attack. They commit torture not to obtain a confession to incriminate anyone, but solely to force him to supply information needed to locate accomplices or the proverbial "ticking time bombs." And he almost never does this under the authority of the government, but on his own.

While I am leary of approving all such uses of torture, in each of the specific scenarios where it was employed, it was generally morally acceptable. It's never the sort of thing on which to base a policy or write a SOP, which is why the application of real world situations and the real life War on Terror to 24 or vice-versa is absolutely idiotic. When I heard that the DOD or US Army complained to the producers or whoever of the show because it was affecting the outlook and attitude of the cadets at the US military academies, all I felt was contempt for the inability of the faculty to parse the difference (to laugh the students out of the classroom for citing fiction as relevant to the USCMJ, and find ways to regret wasting an instructor's time with something so stupid), and for the students who were so clueless they might realistically bring it up as a justification.