WASHINGTON - The International Committee of the Red Cross has accused the United States of torturing enemy combatant prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to documents leaked to The New York Times. Does that mean U.S. interrogators are sticking needles under inmates' fingernails and attaching electrodes to sensitive body parts? Or are they merely beating prisoners senseless? Hardly.
The ICRC report hasn't been made public, but a memorandum summarizing its contents describes far less egregious behavior. Among the tactics the ICRC portrayed as "tantamount to torture" were solitary confinement, temperature extremes and using "forced positions" to obtain information from some of the about 500 men held at Guantanamo.
"The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture," the Times quotes the ICRC report as alleging. But is it?
And if such methods are "torture," is the United States justified in using them anyway? Where do we draw the line between what are admittedly unpleasant, coercive methods used to elicit information that might save lives - thousands, even millions of them - and actions that are so repugnant they may never be used?
In an article in Commentary magazine a few months ago headlined "Torture: Thinking About the Unthinkable," Andrew C. McCarthy tried to answer that question.
Mr. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney, led the prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As Mr. McCarthy makes clear, we are forced into debating the moral parameters of torture because of the very nature of our current enemy. The United States is not at war with a conventional army but with men whose aim is to kill innocent civilians in the most horrific manner possible.
When the Geneva Conventions and other international norms prohibiting torture were developed, Mr. McCarthy notes, they were intended to promote the humane treatment of captured soldiers who operated on behalf of nation-states or intrastate liberation movements. "They did not contemplate a core methodology - targeting civilians, randomly torturing and killing prisoners - that grossly and willfully violates the very premises of humanitarian law," writes Mr. McCarthy.
