Did CIA interrogation of Al Qaeda terrorists amount to torture? And can torture ever be justified?

Can the end ever justify the means? And can any end justify torture? This controversy, which has troubled Americans and Europeans ever since the war on terror began, was reignited this week.

The CIA admits that it destroyed a video of an interrogation of an Al Qaeda terrorist named Abu Zubaida. Speaking on ABC News, a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, gave the first account of how he and his colleagues used “waterboarding” to extract information from Zubaida. Mr. Kiriakou says the technique was authorized by the White House. Its use was justified under the circumstances, he feels, because Zubaida’s intelligence enabled the CIA to disrupt “maybe dozens” of Al Qaeda attacks.

No single issue divides America and Europe more than this one. Also this week, it was announced that several terrorist suspects would be released from Guantanamo who, though not British citizens, in the past have been residents in Great Britain. There was some debate in the British press about whether and how these men should be kept under surveillance, but hardly anybody questioned the assumption that they had been victims of torture. Torture remains the ultimate crime, and even to raise the question of its morality is to court exclusion from polite society.

Yet this high moral tone surely cloaks a good deal of hypocrisy. In the first place, what counts as torture? Waterboarding is doubtless a terrifying experience, akin to drowning, but it does not physically injure the victim and would not have been treated as torture at all by most societies until quite recently. The same applies to other forms of psychological coercion, such as sleep or light deprivation.

Where real torture — deliberately inflicting physical pain — is concerned, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies are more scrupulous than their non-Western counterparts — or indeed their own predecessors in earlier periods. Torture was never routinely used by the Western Allies during World War II, as it was used on an industrial scale by the Nazis, Soviets, and Japanese. But torture was not unknown. There was little sympathy for war criminals who were given a taste of their own medicine.

Further back, even in 17th century England, the rack was still used in the Tower of London. The great legal authority Sir Edward Coke wrote in his “Institutes,” “there is no law to warrant tortures in this land.” But “necessity hath no law.” Those accused of treason might expect to be tortured.

Last week, a book was sold at a British auction that relates the tale of a Jesuit priest, Henry Garnet, executed for treason in 1606. Father Garnet had heard the confessions of the conspirators in the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament. Though he seems not to have approved of this first major act of terrorism in English history, and urged his fellow Catholics against the plot, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered — a form of execution which involved cutting down the victim while still alive, castrating and disembowelling him, and finally cutting out his heart to be shown to the jeering crowd.

In Father Garnet’s case, his body was then flayed and the skin used to bind an account of his trial and execution. Over the centuries, a mysterious image of a man’s face has emerged on the cover of this macabre volume.

Nobody then saw such a cruel, public execution as torture. Now we are so squeamish that even relatively painless forms of execution, such as lethal injections, are seen as too cruel by many.

Jesuits like Father Garnet were (falsely) supposed to teach the doctrine that the end justifies the means. But can this principle — though it may be morally abhorrent in general — sometimes admit to exceptions in the case of terrorism? The prevention of a terrible atrocity may justify all kinds of harsh measures.

In the past two days, Islamists have launched bloody attacks on Algeria, where the U.N. offices were destroyed, and on Lebanon, where Hezbollah assassinated the army’s chief of operations, General François al-Hajj. The aim in both cases is to destabilize an entire country. Any state is entitled to defend itself and its allies. This week’s successful capture of the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala by American, British, and Afghan forces cost hundreds of casualties on both sides.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could not be prosecuted without intelligence obtained by interrogating enemy combatants. Commanders in the field prefer to treat prisoners chivalrously, if only for reasons of self-preservation. But no commander has the right to place his troops’ lives at risk by denying them the benefit of the best intelligence available. Still, less has he the right to jeopardize victory, when defeat may have dire consequences for his country and indeed for humanity. So from Father Garnet, we come back to Abu Zubaida. His waterboarding lasted 35 seconds before this Al Qaeda terrorist cracked. He later told his interrogator that “Allah had visited him in the night and told him to co-operate.”

Might Zubaida have received this divine visitation even without the brief ordeal? Might a visit from an Islamic cleric have achieved the same effect — without the need for waterboarding? We shall never know. But we can be sure that many people now alive would be dead if Zubaida and other terrorists had not been persuaded to talk.

If it was President Bush who authorized waterboarding for Zubaida, I am not outraged but relieved. These decisions should not be left to subordinates. The president will have known the consequences of not giving authorization — consequences infinitely more terrible than inflicting half a minute’s terror on one terrorist. Torture is evil, but on rare occasions it may be the lesser of two evils.