Is torture ever justified? A new report on the C.I.A.'s brutal interrogation of terrorism suspects since 9/11 has reignited the debate over the use of torture.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

Gul Rahman was a prisoner in 2002 at a secret American detention site in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. As part of an interrogation, he was stripped of most of his clothes, beaten, and shackled to the wall of his cell. The next morning, he was found dead of hypothermia, lying on the bare concrete floor with cuts and bruises on his legs, face, and torso.

The Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) suspected that Rahman was a terrorist bent on killing Americans. Was his brutal interrogation an act of torture? And was it justified, given the terrorism threat following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.?

The long debate over how to define torture and when--if ever--it should be used has been reignited by a report on the C.I.A.'s harsh post-9/11 interrogation methods.

The 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, part of which was released in December, details many incidents, including Rahman's interrogation, that were part of a C.I.A. program to investigate terrorist threats against the U.S. The report concluded that the C.I.A.'s methods were more brutal--and less effective--than the agency claimed; it also charged that C.I.A. officials misled the public and Congress about the information obtained through what security officials called "enhanced interrogation tactics."

According to the report, those methods included depriving detainees of sleep for up to a week; subjecting them to medical procedures such as "rectal rehydration" that were painful, humiliating, and medically unnecessary; and telling them that they would be killed while in American custody.

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding--a controversial interrogation technique that simulates drowning--than the three people the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past.

President Obama praised C.I.A. employees as "patriots" to whom "we owe a profound debt of gratitude" for trying to protect the country. But he also said the interrogation tactics described in the report were, in his mind, torture and a betrayal of American values.

"Some of these techniques that were described were not only wrong," said Obama, "but also counterproductive because we know that oftentimes when somebody is being subjected to these kinds of techniques, that they're willing to say anything in order to alleviate the pain."

But many Republicans and people in the intelligence community have lashed out against the report. Three former C.I.A. directors called it biased and riddled with errors. They object that they weren't consulted by the Senate investigators who compiled the report, nor was anyone at the C.I.A. Former C.I.A. director George Tenet called the report "biased, inaccurate, and destructive," adding that it "does damage to U.S. national security."

A Defining Moment

Dick Cheney, vice president under President George W. Bush (2001-09), was closely involved in discussions about interrogation methods after 9/11. Cheney strongly defended the C.I.A. program and denied that the tactics described in the report were torture.

"Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11," Cheney said. "There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation."

The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were a defining moment in the nation's history. Early that morning, 19 members of Al Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist group, hijacked four commercial airliners. They flew two planes into the World Trade Center in New York, striking the 110-story-tall twin towers like missiles. By 10:30 a.m., both towers had collapsed, killing more than 2,700 people.

An hour earlier, they flew an American Airlines flight into the Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C. And a fourth flight, United 93, crashed in rural Pennsylvania, brought down as passengers tried to retake control of the plane. Authorities believe this plane was supposed to fly into the White House.

In all, 2,977 people died that day--more than the number who perished in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the highest one-day death toll on American soil since the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War.

But the damage went far beyond the death toll. Americans had watched the unfolding horror of the day live on TV, and even those far away from...