Can torture be justified?

Shortly after the Taliban were routed in Afghanistan, President Bush warned of the major danger now facing the United States: "Shadowy terrorist networks."

Speaking to newly minted officers at West Point, some of them headed for combat in Iraq, their commander in chief said they must "take the battle to the enemy ... disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge."

More than ever, disrupting plans and confronting threats takes good military intelligence - much of it from captured sources. But reported abuses in US-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, focus attention on how harshly suspected enemies are treated in the process of finding out what they know.

Use of torture (an imprecise term for extreme physical and mental duress) raises two fundamental questions: Does it work? That is, does it produce the "actionable intelligence" that might save lives on the battlefield or at home? And can it be justified on moral and ethical grounds?

Such questions will be the backdrop for a hastily called Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday featuring top Army officers responsible for prisoner treatment in Iraq: Gen. John Abizaid, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller.

Harsh treatment of wartime captives - whether it comes as pain, humiliation, sexual intimidation, or fear - can bring information that is useful. It may well have led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. With just one such source, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 might have been averted.

But many experts think treatment so severe as to be inhumane can be useless or counterproductive. "Even milder torture ... can result in false confessions, that is, information that is flat-out inaccurate," says Steven Welsh of the Center for Defense Information in Washington.

Or it can make things even more dangerous for the US, others say. "Violations of the Geneva Convention can turn a people against the United States and toward the guerrillas or terrorists," says Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. "It can also act as a recruiting tool for terrorists."

Former CIA chief Stansfield Turner adds three more reasons to avoid the kind of treatment prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements the US is party to: "It undermines the values we are defending; it makes US citizens, especially military personnel, more vulnerable to similar treatment; it diminishes US stature in the world."

Yet fighting an enemy that appears to have no other goal than destroying you - and clearly does not hold to the niceties of international law in the abuse and murder of those it captures - makes that reasoning problematic.

"At least one purpose of the laws of armed conflict is to discourage atrocities during war that would preclude reconciliation of the combatants once the war ended," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va. "The problem is that according to Al Qaeda's view of matters, this is a war of extermination, in which postwar reconciliation is inconceivable."

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