By Richard Cohen

Thursday, March 6, 2003; Page A23

Soon after the recent capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the al Qaeda operations chief, AOL reacted with alacrity: "Making A Terrorist Talk: If Not Torture, What's The Best Way To Break Him? Tell us."

One of the first to respond was a creative fellow who suggested that Muslim terrorists be placed with swine, since the eating of pork is forbidden. "Then we should give them a sex change operation." Ouch.

Sex change operations aside, the question remains whether the United States should ever resort to torture to pry what could be lifesaving information from suspected terrorists. Apparently, more than a few Americans think so. Among them is the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who would, however, involve the courts. In effect, the government would have to ask a judge for a torture warrant.

Dershowitz, no slouch as a civil libertarian, is a prominent member of the "get real" crowd. They argue that we are in a new kind of war and need new kinds of rules. This is especially the case when faced with the so-called ticking bomb predicament: What if a captured terrorist knew a bomb was about to go off somewhere? Should he be tortured to reveal what he knows?

An old boss of mine had a file he labeled "too tough." I put the ticking bomb scenario in a similar file I keep in my head, hopelessly caught between the late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson's admonition about converting "the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact" and the horrible recognition that torture is not merely an interrogation technique, it is a descent into barbarity. Officially, at least, no nation condones it.

Of course, lots of nations practice it. Some of them, as it happens, are our allies. The Washington Post reported on Dec. 26 that the United States shipped -- "rendered," is the term of obfuscation -- some suspected terrorists to these countries to be, well, tortured. The information is then used by U.S. intelligence, which pretends ignorance. The Post named Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.

Here is what happened after The Post broke that story: nothing. The Bush administration naturally denied that it condones torture, and the American public, possibly busy returning Christmas presents, smartly moved on to the funny pages. Only some human rights organizations paid any attention, but they might as well have been yelling into the wind. No one gave a damn.

But we should. Just to be pragmatic, torture is not as effective as it's cracked up to be. Your average torture victim is likely to say anything to relieve the pain -- the truth, a lie or, if he happens to be innocent, whatever will please his jailers. Undeniably, though, there are times when torture does the trick. It has not been around all this time for no reason.

Now we must return to my fellow AOL subscriber and his modest proposal regarding sex change operations. What he intuited is that torture is not merely an interrogation technique. It is a form of punishment, harsh and irrevocable -- applied to the innocent as well as the guilty. "Whoever was tortured, stays tortured," wrote the late Jean Amery.

Amery, a resistance fighter, had been tortured by the Nazis. His hands were tied behind his back, a hook was lowered from the ceiling and he was raised by it. "All your life is gathered in a single limited area of the body, the shoulder joints," he wrote.

"Twenty-two years later, I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms." He ultimately committed suicide.

At one time, the authorities -- secular or religious -- had the unquestioned right to inflict such punishment. Much of Western civilization has amounted to the tough slog away from that understanding -- two steps forward, one back. Torture was central to Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, hardly ancient regimes. It is still practiced all over the world by despotic and desperate governments. Torture one person and you cow an entire population.

When it comes to torture -- especially its more benign variations (sleep deprivation, shaking, etc.) -- I would never say never. But those who counsel us to "get real" have a heavy obligation to confront a different kind of reality. Torture is a beast with a rapacious appetite. The sanctimonious French wound up using it indiscriminately in Algeria; the Argentine junta, faced with a terrorist threat as real as our own, also tortured on a grand scale.

Civilization is threatened not only by terrorists but also by the means we use to fight them. The torturer always thinks he's justified and, in the end, he's invariably proved right. After all, the difference between innocence and guilt is only a matter of time.