Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a terrorist. U.S. intelligence considers him the “mastermind” of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the October 2002 nightclub bombing in Bali, Indonesia; CIA director George Tenet referred to him as the intelligence “motherlode” of the war on terrorism. Mohammed is also a captive: He was nabbed in Pakistan in early March. And, in a development that could help the United States gather information about future terrorist attacks, Mo -hammed turns out to be something else: a father.

His two sons, ages 7 and 9, were captured in 2002 and are being held by the Central Intelligence Agency. A CIA official told London's Sunday Tele -graph, “We fully intend to use the fact that his two young sons are now in U.S. custody as leverage. We think the prospect of their freedom will be enormous leverage.”

Mohammed and his sons are lucky enough to be under U.S. supervision, where the boys are being seen by child psychologists and even the terrorist father is legally protected from torture. Other suspected terrorists have not been so fortunate. The United States has turned captives over to countries whose sense of human dignity is perhaps not as refined as America's — countries such as Afghanistan, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco, which have no qualms about pulling out fingernails, using electric shock or any of the panoply of techniques in the torturer's arsenal.

Backdoor Torture?

In March 2002, the Washington Post reported, “Since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has secretly transported dozens of people suspected of links to terrorists to countries other than the United States, bypassing extradition procedures and legal formalities, according to Western diplomats and intelligence sources. The suspects have been taken to countries, including Egypt and Jordan, whose intelligence services have close ties to the CIA and where they can be subjected to interrogation tactics — including torture and threats to families — that are illegal in the United States, the sources said. In some cases, U.S. intelligence agents remain closely involved in the interrogation, the sources said.”

In other words, the United States relies on repressive Arab states' willingness to torture suspects, even as it claims to press for liberalization in those same states. And after the deaths of two Al Qaeda members at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, former detainees have alleged the United States was more directly involved in torture: Examinations of the prisoners' corpses showed they had been beaten, and former detainees signed statements claiming they were hung from ceilings, kicked, deprived of sleep and beaten. The deaths at Bagram have been classified as homicides.

Is that a problem? Many CIA officials don't think so: One told Canada's National Post, “After all, if you don't violate a prisoner's human rights some of the time, then you aren't doing your job.” And many Americans shocked by the Sept. 11 attacks don't think so. Even some prominent political thinkers, such as controversial law professor Alan Dershowitz and pundit Pat Buchanan, have no problem with torturing terrorists.

Buchanan, a Catholic, placed national security above the catechism (and U.S. law) in his syndicated column when he argued that a “higher law” allowed for torture in extraordinary circumstances. Buchanan argued, “[I]f doctors can cut off limbs and open up hearts to save lives, cops may shoot criminals to save lives and the state may execute criminals, why cannot we commit a lesser evil — squeezing the truth out of Mohammed — for a far greater good: preventing the murder of innocents[?]”

Buchanan spoke for many Americans — people such as Ray Downing, whose firefighter son was killed at the World Trade Center. Downing told the National Post: “They should cut off their fingers one by one until they talk.”

Downing deserves our deepest sympathy, of course, but the ethic he espoused in his grief eats away at values we must be committed to preserve as Catholics and as Americans. “By any means necessary” is an ethic that warps our character and goes against our religion.

In discussing the Fifth Commandment (“You shall not kill”), the catechism declares, “Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity” (No. 2297). The U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which the United States has signed and ratified (giving the treaty the force of American law), prohibits deliberately causing “severe” pain and suffering. The treaty adds, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and prohibits extradition “to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

The treaty does allow “discomfort”; many standard American interrogation techniques are still allowable. For example, interrogation sessions lasting almost a full day, good cop/bad cop routines, using female interrogators (which often upsets Muslim terrorists), making captives wear black hoods to disorient them and even forcing captives to stand in painful positions are all considered unpleasant but not torture.

But as Catholics and as engaged citizens, it's not enough to just quote the rules. We have an obligation to seek to understand why both God's law and man's law forbid torture.

How would accepting torture — whether done in the United States or by other countries at our tacit request — change our society? Raymond Chandler described his noir detective Philip Marlowe by saying, “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” That might sound sentimental, but the alternatives are far worse: the belief that those who protect society stand outside the law; the belief that America must be protected by any means necessary. Marlowe was a tough guy, and it's tough to say we will not fight dirty. Down these mean streets a country must go that is not itself mean — a country that does not believe in useful cruelty.

Liberty and Mercy

A torturing nation accepts a mind-set that is inhospitable to liberty and mercy, a mind-set that places self-preservation above everything. But one of the basic components of a liberal society such as America is the willingness to accept danger in order to preserve certain inalienable rights. Even if it would make society safer, liberalism rejects bans on political ideology (radical Islam, say, or communism during the Cold War). Even if it made society safer, liberalism condemns the Japanese- and Italian-American internments.

We can argue about whence our rights derive, but if they are not favors bestowed by society then they must be based on truths about the human person. One of those basic truths is human dignity — an inescapable degree of responsibility and worth that we can't throw away even if we try to. And it's precisely this dignity that torture assaults; it's this dignity that torture conditions the torturer to ignore.

The underlying justification for torture is the utilitarian calculus: the denial of human dignity in the interest of physical safety. It is the logic of all “ends justify the means” projects today, from targeting civilians to embryo-destructive research. And it is utterly opposed to the logic of the cross.

Eve Tushnet, a former Register staff

writer, is based in Washington, D.C.