Torture turns its victims into the most abject animals, and its practitioners into the most craven monsters. I can't find it in myself to believe that any morally normal person truly supports it.

This is why I'm puzzled by my colleague Tom Walker's Nov. 19 editorial "Finding the middle ground on military torture." He comes, painfully, to the conclusion that torture is sometimes justified — but it's not.

Walker begins by arguing that Michael Mukasey, who refused to say whether he considered water-boarding torture (an interrogation technique also known as "simulated drowning") received a raw deal from the Senate Democrats who tried to stymie his nomination as Attorney General.

He notes, correctly, that even as they tried to foil Mukasey's appointment, many Democratic leaders refused to stake out a position condemning torture altogether. Actually, I find this extremely frustrating too.

But if doublespeak is his complaint, then there's plenty of blame to go around. The Bush administration can't bring itself to admit that water-boarding, which is a relic of the Inquisition that by all legal standards (save the ones the Bush Justice Department has invented for itself) constitutes an act of torture, is anything more than an "enhanced interrogation technique."

Walker himself is reluctant to "encourage" torture, but he finally decides that in a ticking time bomb emergency, or when there's "essential intelligence information" to be extracted, the use of torture may be justified.

There's no doubt in my mind that Walker, and all other grudging supporters of torture, care deeply about this country and its moral fiber.

But in even tacitly accepting torture as a legitimate policy, they reveal a deep confusion about what it means to be a patriot in America.

In his essay "The Abolition of Torture," the eloquent libertarian Andrew Sullivan aptly defines torture as the manipulation of the victim's most basic instinct — to resist pain — to destroy his mind and his will: "It takes what is animal in us and deploys it against what makes us human."

Torture is the purest possible domination of one human being by another. It's an invasion and conquest of the core depths of his psyche, the total eradication of his autonomy and personhood; it amounts to the destruction of the moral basis of individual liberty and rights.

How could the contrast with the basic tenets of our system be any starker? History is filled with states built to unify a race, or a religion, or a language group. Our system is unique, founded as it is on two much simpler and more concrete principles: that human beings have innate rights and the government's mission is to protect them.

Torture, therefore, isn't just a temporary recess from the principles the United States has traditionally stood for. It's the complete negation of this country's basic fabric, the shredding apart of the moral backbone that makes America special. Without that, America isn't America anymore, we're just another tribe.

And it's worth repeating that torture will do us no good.

Torture opponents are fond of pointing out that water-boarding, sleep deprivation, freezing temperatures and the plethora of other tactics we've discovered that the U.S. government routinely employs were also used by the Inquisition, the Nazis, the Soviets and so forth.

That should give us pause, of course, but there's a deeper point here.

These tyrants didn't practice torture as a necessary evil, a way to obtain good intelligence quickly. A person being tortured will say anything, true or not, and send his interrogators hunting for phantom bombs and nonexistent spies. The inquisitors and Stalinists knew that torture is good for only one thing: extracting false confessions.

Last month, The Washington Post profiled a group of World War II veterans, interrogation specialists who claimed that they "got more information out of a German general in a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today with their torture." One proudly stated, "I never laid hands on anyone. ... I never compromised my humanity."

This is how Americans interrogate prisoners, even under threat from enemies far more powerful and dangerous than the ones we face now.

Still, Walker advises us to stop hog-tying our intelligence people with prohibitions on torture, warning that we "may look back in sorrowful regret if we don't."

No, we will certainly look back in sorrowful regret if we do. And the sorrow will be all the more torturous, you might say, when we realize it will have been for nothing.

[Reach columnist Chris Kaasa at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]