Where Does Interrogation Become Torture?

May 22, 2004 -- In early 2003, as U.S. troops were still racing north to Baghdad, chaos and looting erupted in the southern city of Basra, where a man walked up to ABCNEWS with a handful of photographs he had found digging through the rubble of the secret police building, which had been set on fire.

The pictures showed torture victims — some burned, some blinded. They were snapshots of life under Saddam Hussein. Seemingly it was over, because America was in Iraq, and America does not torture.

But now come other snapshots, this time from Abu Ghraib prison depicting U.S. abuse of Iraqis.

Beyond the first shock come questions: Is shaming a man with nudity as bad as burning him or blinding him? And even if it's not, is this still a form of torture? And are there times when torture is justified — for example, if it will save the lives of your own soldiers?

The August 2003 suicide bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad was a kind of last straw moment for the U.S. military, after weeks where the Iraqi resistance had been killing U.S. troops and others one or two at a time.

Around that time, U.S.-run prisons began to swell with detainees. The goal was to get dangerous people behind barbed wire and find out what they knew that could save American lives.

How Rough Can It Get?

But in the process of trying to save American lives, a lot of innocent Iraqis were swept up. A lot of abuses were reported by the International Committee of the Red Cross to the coalition, and the events pictured at Abu Ghraib happened.

The Army says what happened in the photographs is not U.S. policy, though critics have voiced doubts. Still, the question is, how rough does the United States want its soldiers to get? If nighttime raids that terrify whole Iraqi families are acceptable, how about terrorizing just one prisoner with a dog if it's believed that it will save U.S. lives?

Taking the example out of Iraq, say for instance the FBI knew before 9/11 that something was planned and it had a suspect with knowledge. Should they have been able to torture him to stop it?

Israel has wrestled with this very question through decades of fighting terrorism.