TERROR AND TORTURE.(use of torture when dealing with terrorist suspects)

"I see that a man I know to be a ruffian is pursuing a young girl,"Leo Tolstoy wrote in "The Kingdom of God Is Within You.""I have a gun in my hand--I kill the ruffian and save the girl. But the death or the wounding of the ruffian has positively taken place, while what would have happened if this had not been I cannot know. And what an immense mass of evil must result, and indeed does result, from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen. Ninety-nine per cent of the evil of the world is founded on this reasoning--from the Inquisition to dynamite bombs.”

This is the traditional case for pacifism. It hangs on an insight about means and ends. "Thou shalt not kill”: whether the commandment is seen as coming from God or simply from self-evident moral intuition, few dispute that to kill is to commit a wrong, and that to refrain from killing is to prevent a wrong. In war, killing is the means. The end--the "war aim,"the putative goal of the killing--may be right, but it is speculative, possibly unachievable, off in a future that is more or less unknowable. By its example, and by its corrupting effect, killing begets killing, evil begets evil. To do evil today, in the expectation that in the future, at the end of a long chain of causation and chance, something good will emerge, is the wager that pacifists refuse to make.

Governments have little patience with this line of thought, whether or not they are willing to excuse its adherents from military service. (What if the ruffian had just been seen to murder the young girl's family? Tolstoy does not say.) Neither do the great majority of people, who, while seeing no virtue in killing, nevertheless believe that there are times when war is the preferred moral choice. But the logic of conscientious objection, which is also the logic of the Golden Rule, is powerful enough to make itself felt even at the level where states pursue their interests with all due lethality and hypocrisy. In the continuum of political violence--assassination, torture, terrorism, and war, reading from small-scale to large--international law deems war alone to be permissible, albeit only in extreme circumstances, and tries to tame it with rules and conventions. The rest are seen, theoretically at least, as outside the pale--as means that no end can be allowed to justify.

At the present dismal and disorienting moment, everything, as they say in Washington, is on the table. Before September 11, 2001, no one imagined that a time would come when the permissibility of torture would be an urgent topic of public discussion, let alone something like the official, though of course unacknowledged, policy of the United States. The arrest earlier this month, in Pakistan, of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, an alleged senior lieutenant of Al Qaeda, touched off a round of speculation about how the government might try to separate him from his information. But for some time there have been reliable reports of American interrogators' subjecting terror suspects to what the C.I.A. calls "stress and duress"techniques. In a landmark Washington Post story last December 26th, Dana Priest and Barton Gellman listed some of those techniques: beating people; forcing them to stand or kneel for hours, or holding them in awkward, painful positions; using bright lights or loud noises to deprive them systematically of sleep; if they are ill or have been wounded, withholding medical attention and painkillers; and turning them over to countries whose methods of inquiry are not so gentle.

It can be debated how many of these methods violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted."The last of them almost certainly violates the ...