"This makes one suspect you have never experienced real pain."
Have, but not political torture, unless the mental variety all thinking people are subject to qualifies... still, headaches, depression, panic attacks and appendicitis are very painful, but not quite part of this dreadful "choice" menu
"Why do people jump to their death out of burning buildings?"
that is an even scarier "choice" forced on humans, but they aren't choosing between life and death...that is a forced choice of kind-of-death...
there are no survivors of death, unless you believe in supernatural and religious fables, only survivors of torture...polll those survivors and find out how many regret still being alive, and not being able to tell others of their terrible experience...
also consider whether there would be a holocaust industry, or a holocaust denial sub-industry, if the nazis had only used torture chambers, and not gas chambers, and run torture camps, and not death camps...
still a lousy choice, and a feeble argument to offer for the "laws" of war, which drew the original criticism of the perverted logic that makes it legal to kill thousands of people, but not torture them...
fs