The News and Observer, our local paper here at the Parr Center for Ethics, published an opinion piece on torture by Mark Bowden.

It seems his position is that torture should not be made legal, although sometimes it may be justified to torture.

The use of any coercive tactics against prisoners ought to expose those responsible to prosecution...

He says torture should be illegal because it's heinous and to legalize it would remove us from "ethical purity." However...

... few fair-minded people would weigh that ethical purity more heavily than preventing further attacks like those that killed thousands in September 2001.

The real damage done by Bush administration torture policies was the effort to codify coercion.

... all forms of torture, broadly defined, ought to be banned. What does such a ban mean? It means that anyone who gets rough with a prisoner is crossing the line and placing himself at risk. This, history makes clear, is the only way to curb the universal tendency of men to abuse those over whom they wield complete control.

Bowden is saying that it should remain illegal, although on some rare occasions a moral person would break the law and justifiably conduct torture.

Making it illegal...

does not mean that there can be no circumstance in which torture is justified, at least to those who would not adhere blindly to principle. Life presents moral dilemmas, and combat in particular produces them. To obtain life-saving intelligence when no alternative means are at hand, a moral person might reluctantly accept the responsibility for crossing that line. Those who investigate his actions later can determine whether they were justified, but the moral person accepts that he or she may suffer for making that choice.

So that's his position.

But he goes on to suggest that if he were among the "investigators" of those who tortured KSM and Zubaydah he'd be sympathetic with their motivation.

I [...] respect the decision in 2002 to take whatever steps were necessary to pry information from Sheikh Muhammad and Zubaydah. An inquiry may reveal that their questioners were motivated primarily by a desire to inflict suffering and that they achieved nothing, but I doubt it. I believe they were urgently motivated to thwart attacks on al-Qaeda's drawing boards, and probably did so.

Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that the torture we are talking about was conducted not in any kind of ticking time bomb scenario. But rather it was used to find a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. A link we now know did not exist.

Lawrence Wilkerson, republican, retired Army colonel, and former chief of staff for Colin Powel, wrote in the Washington Note:

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda,"

CNN reports on it here. From CNN:

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney's office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP's office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote.

"The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts."

More from CNN:

"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general's office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link ... there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Burney's account was included in a Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April.