Reasonable people can — and do — disagree about the degree to which the government should expose terror suspects to "discomfort" during interrogations.

Legal opinions, public as well as secret, that attempt to define "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners, "torture" and, because of a Supreme Court ruling, acts that "shock the conscience," abound within the Justice Department and the White House.

While some believe harsh measures — those that produce organ failure, for example — yield crucial intelligence that can save thousands of lives, other experts say less extreme measures are equally or more effective than treatment that borders on torture.

Complicating the issue for lawyers and interrogators is the effect (and legality) of combining painful physical tactics with psychological methods.

Some say that, as terror suspects, prisoners have no rights and interrogators can treat them as harshly as they want. Others properly point out that detainees are only suspects, and that U.S. mistreatment of those suspects undermines our nation's image throughout the world and places the lives of Americans held abroad at risk.

John Hutson, who served as the Navy's top lawyer from 1997 to 2000, sums up the dilemma eloquently.

"I know from the military that if you tell someone they can do a little of this for the country's good, some people will do a lot of it for the country's better," Mr. Hutson told the New York Times. "The problem is, once you've got a legal opinion that says such a technique is OK, what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him? How do we protest then?"

In other words, we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

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