Can the use of torture ever be justified?

It was generally agreed that the law does not permit torture under any circumstances. But then there was a partial agreement that there might be circumstances in which the absolutism of banning torture might be circumvented.

The most common moral dilemma in any torture debate is the so-called "ticking bomb" case. What if there is a bomb ticking, and you have a suspect whom you know could tell you where the bomb is? Would it be ethical to use torture to extract the information, thus saving the dozens, perhaps hundreds of lives?

Then there was the question of just what constitutes torture, and if there are going to be exceptions to the rules, how much torture should be allowed? Until a few years ago the Israelis permitted what they called "moderate physical pressure," which meant sleep deprivation, covering heads with hoods, forcing prisoners into uncomfortable positions for long periods, keeping prisoners too hot or too cold, and violent shaking. Then in 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court reversed earlier legal findings and banned torture outright.

The United States has not been averse to the kind of moderate physical pressure the Israelis were indulging in. Today's suspects in Guantanamo and in Afghanistan's Bagram base are routinely subjected to similar methods of interrogation. The US government maintains that these methods are legal and moral.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, suggested soon after 9/11 that there be "torture warrants." Would-be torturers would need to go before a judge to get permission to torture. Dershowitz argued that since there is going to be "off the books" torture anyway, giving out torture warrants would actually mean less torture as warrants would bring "accountability and a public record of every warrant sought and granted."

Some delegates to the conference thought it important to ask who and what type of person might be eligible for torture. "My sense of morality doesn't emerge" when it comes to suicide bombers and the like, said one. There was no "moral equivalency" between Al Qaeda suspects and their jailers, said another.

Others wondered what the effect on society would be if torture were permitted. An Israeli suggested that maybe special interrogation units ought to accompany combat troops to keep the unpleasant part of interrogations away from the eyes and ears of ordinary soldiers -- a suggestion that struck me as remarkable given the history of such units 60 years ago on the eastern front.

There was a discussion of the circumstances in which torture might be used short of a ticking bomb, and one criterion put forth was: "If the adversary is systematically engaged in tactics which, if conducted by a state, would be viewed as gross violations of human rights."

The trouble with ticking bomb theories is that such a case has almost never happened, but the rationale is used to extract information of increasingly less importance. One delegate said that if she were presented with a situation in which she had to save her child, she might resort to torture with the full knowledge that it was illegal and that she would pay the consequences. She would plead mitigating circumstances, not innocence.

Many stressed that since 9/11 we are in an entirely new situation that requires breaking old rules. But of course this situation is not entirely new. This country wrestled with the issue of how many bad things we could do against a ruthless foe in defense of democracy back in the late '40s when the Cold War was emerging. And a great deal earlier than that St. Augustine struggled with the concept of a loving God lifting the commandment against killing if there were lives to be saved.

I found myself recalling the words of Harvard Law School's Philip Heymann, a former deputy US attorney general, who last year wrote: "Torture is a prescription for losing a war for support of our beliefs in the hope of reducing the casualties from relatively small battles." Clearly no one at the conference approved of torture. But there was an undertone that just maybe Al Qaeda members did not quite share the same humanity as the rest of us, and I thought I heard the all-important bar against torture in a democracy coming down a peg.

The Israeli Supreme Court's landmark decision was said by one delegate to be a "posture, not an answer." But torture is not something that should be permitted under any circumstances. Period. Let us not add the right not to be tortured to the list of rights and liberties we are giving up in the name of the war on terror.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.