Can West justify torture in anti-terror war?

A terrorist suspect has just been caught, knows where a 'dirty bomb' is about to go off in your town, but refuses to talk.

Do you agree with the use of torture to extract information from him that may save thousands of lives?

Long a theoretical question, that so-called "ticking bomb" scenario has now become an uncomfortably real moral question for the West in its handling of the post-September 11 war on terror.

It is an issue especially on the minds of US interrogators this week as they hold suspected September 11 mastermind and leading al Qaeda figure Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at a secret location following his capture last week in Pakistan.

Should they - as colleagues have been alleged to do with other terror suspects in recent months - indulge in a bit of "soft torture" in service of the common good?

If information were obtained to foil imminent attacks, would it be justified to spread-eagle Mohammed for hours against a wall, force him to wear a hood, bombard him with noise, shine lights on him 24 hours, or deprive him of medical aid?

Those are the techniques, dubbed "torture lite" by some, that US officials are accused of in a trend that has horrified rights groups but won some public acceptance according to polls.

"It is morally very dangerous. And legally it will undermine international human rights' law," UK-based international human rights law lecturer Deirdre Fottrell told Reuters.

Washington insists it has not and will not cross the line into torture, outlawed in numerous international treaties.

But it says it reserves the right to use "all appropriate techniques". And comments like that of Cofer Black - ex-head of CIA counter-terrorism who was quoted last year as saying: "after 9/11 the gloves came off" - have fuelled suspicions.

Critics say if that were the case, Washington is violating international law in the same way Britain was accused of doing against Northern Irish rebels in past decades, France against Algerian insurgents in the 1950s, and Israel against Palestinian detainees at the moment.

Allegations came to the fore in a December article by the Washington Post reporting that CIA interrogators used "stress and duress" on prisoners at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

Quoting former intelligence officials and current US national security officials, the Post said captives were sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles. They were also allegedly held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep.

Some who did not cooperate were turned over to foreign intelligence services known for brutal interrogation techniques like Jordan, Egypt and Morocco, the Post said.

As well as Bagram, suspicion has fallen on US tactics at its Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba - where more than 600 prisoners captured during the Afghan war are being held - and a US Indian Ocean base on the British island of Diego Garcia.

"It is happening in a legal no-man's land," academic Fottrell said, noting the suspects were not on US territory and were deprived of prisoner of war status under the Geneva Convention as Washington labelled them "unlawful combatants".

But can the ends justify the means? "The kind of men who are willing to lay down their lives flying aeroplanes into the Twin Towers are not going to spill the beans in return for a cigarette and a cup of coffee," said UK newspaper columnist Stephen Glover in one of numerous Western media articles in the growing debate.

Like most commentators, he finally concludes that stooping to "the dark arts of torture, which have disgusted civilised men since the Enlightenment" is a victory for terrorism. Others fear torture will surge worldwide if the West endorses it.

One leading US law professor Alan Dershowitz has fanned the controversy by proposing judges issue "torture warrants" to validate its use in extreme cases. He insists he is not backing torture but urging accountability in an inevitable process.

"If we have to do something as extreme as break our taboo against physical torture, it has to come from the top, not some low-ranking CIA operator in the field," he told Reuters.

Others say a more humane solution is to inject a so-called "truth" serum, but no drugs have been proved to work.