I hitherto have not ventured very often on to the noisy battlefield of Torture and its diplomatic and political and moral ramifications. Although this posting about the unnoticed and permanently pained victims of terrorist violence says most of what I feel on the issue.

I have steered clear because everyone else appears to be opining furiously on the subject, none more than the breathless Craig Murray.

Plus it seems hard to say anything sensible on the subject when it is being used to make cheap party political points.

Partly again because so many of the people baying for ‘action’ against those who are said to have sanctioned torture seem to be expecting people faced with the personal and professional responsibility of grappling with appalling choices to live up to impossibly high standards, while they themselves turn a blind eye to regimes which have behaved far worse for far longer. The whole issue stinks of the vilest hypocrisy:

Hillary Clinton was seemingly much clearer, declaring that "As a matter of policy, [torture] cannot be American policy, period." But buried in this unequivocal statement is a lawyerly loophole, evident in the carefully constructed caveat, "as a matter of policy."

But still, she came close to standing her own previous position on its head. On an earlier occasion, she had held that there were "very rare" instances in which severe interrogation methods might be necessary and that the United States needs "lawful authority" to engage in them in cases involving an "imminent threat to millions of Americans."

Hillary’s reversal here–and it is only a partial reversal–brings us back to the vicious circle. How would she know that the person she wants to torture has the knowledge she is seeking? And why authorize torture only when the lives of "millions of Americans" are at risk? What about thousands or hundreds or ten?

The line-drawing here is immensely difficult. If it were simple, we wouldn’t be debating the question so fiercely. But what is galling is the sanctimony and the moral grandstanding of those who would ban harsh interrogation methods absolutely–except in those instances when they would authorize them themselves.

And it no longer seems to matter what ‘torture’ in fact is and how it is defined. Anything which upsets people enough to compel them to blurt things out seems to be classified as ‘impermissible pressure amounting to torture’ or somesuch.

Not to mention the fact that our MPs piously lambasting the government on the British record on this subject are sitting in a Parliament which relied on torture to excellent effect to find out all about the Gunpowder Plot.

Maybe above all because the debate is steered for cynical reasons away from the core issue.

Which is that there are running around out there violent obsessive people who for reasons unfathomable to the huge majority of people in the UK want to kill or maim British and ‘Western’ citizens in formidable numbers – to inflict massive and sustained pain themselves.

Plus these people are often hardened ideologues and well trained and supported in their anti-Wesatern fanaticism. Which means that if they are arrested they can summon to their aid a mini-army of lawyers and media-savvy NGOs hollering about their rights, plus they will (a) do everything possible to avoid letting on what they may have been up to while (b) lying noisily that they have been brutalised in captivity.

So, the Problem. How to get them to talk?

At one end of the spectrum is to break down their resistance by being friendly – somehow persuading them of the error of their ways, and then gently pointing out that they are now in a bad spot which can be improved if they cooperate. Slow; expensive; may or may not work.

At the other is being revoltingly cruel on a Saddam Hussein scale. Cheap, can be slow or fast depending on how sadistic the torturers were that day; may or may not work.

And in the middle is a vast swamp of uncertainty and no good answers.

All of which is a laborious way to urge you to read this modest and profound analysis of the subject:

Judging the justice of the Bush administration’s policies on torture thus requires answering a single (extremely difficult) question: Was the administration right to believe that militant Islam posed (and perhaps still poses) an existential threat to the United States?

If the answer is yes, then its policies may very well have been justified and even demanded by the circumstances. If the answer is no, then its leading officials may well have been guilty of bending or breaking the law for no good reason — most likely out of a combination of ignorance, fear, and paranoia.

So what’s the answer? In the months following 9/11, I certainly thought another spectacular attack was imminent and seriously pondered the possibility of a nuclear detonation in New York City (where I worked, about two miles from Ground Zero) or Washington — an event that would not only kill hundreds of thousands if not millions in an instant but also wipe out trillions of dollars of wealth and spark panic in cities around the world. Urban civilization itself seemed under threat.

Seven-and-a-half years later, such fears seem delusional, no doubt in large part because there have been no more attacks on the United States. Is that because the Bush administration’s much-derided policies thwarted attacks that would have otherwise been carried out? Or is it because the threat was never as great as the administration feared it was?

The truth is that I have no idea. And neither does anyone else writing on the topic.

Which of course does nothing to deter the energetic and literate contributors to the extended discussion thread this little essay provokes. Read the essay at least, if only to see a thoughtful mind (Damon Linker) taking all this back to Aristotle.

One last point. The issue often gets debated in a debating-club way: "This House would not allow torture even if it was likely to produce information which could save many innocent lives."

Hence (as per that comment thread on the Linker piece) a lot of convoluted theorizing and empty conjecture over the possibility of reliable and operationally useful information ever emerging via torture.

In practice it does not mainly work that way. Whatever is said in detention by terrorist suspects (or even by terrorists who are known for sure to have planned to kill people but who might not end up being prosecuted for technicality reasons and so are formally ‘innocent’) has to be checked and cross-checked against all sorts of other information.

Which means that you may not get gobbets of ‘information’ in the form of "OK OK an attack is planned in Trafalgar Square next Wednesday" but instead wisps of truth in among many lies which help build up a reliable insight into what is happening within these networks and so cast light on what they might be up to so that they can be thwarted and many lives saved.

What does it all boil down to?

The UN Convention defines the core act of torture thus:

… any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted …

It follows that any pain or suffering which is not ‘severe’ is not torture.

So let’s influence the thinking of terrorist suspects not by being ‘severe’, but instead by doing and saying to them many creative things just short of ‘severe’, to make them see the advantage in cooperating more or less openly.

OK, everyone?