*Originally published November 23, 2003.*

CAIRO, Egypt - The old woman sits cross-legged on a dirty floor, moaning and weeping. A cockroach scuttles across her bare foot but she doesn't notice, lost as she is in the memory of a murdered son. "He never made trouble," Karima sobs, her thin body swaying back and forth. "He was such a prince. He was such a sweet man."

Her face suddenly turns hard and bitter. "May the people who deprived me of him be deprived of the breath of life," she spits.

Karima's oath is meant for the police officers of Tanta, a small city about an hour's drive from Cairo. In September, 2002, she believes, the police arrested her 31-year-old son, Shebl and tortured him to death. Then they threw his body out the fifth-floor window of the police station to make it look like a suicide.

On Sept. 12, 2001, George W. Bush said something he had avoided saying the day before. "The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror," he told reporters. "They were acts of war."

The decision to frame the response to 9-11 as a "war" was a fateful one. Before that moment, western democracies would never have sent their soldiers to fight endless battles in distant and obscure deserts. Imprisonment without charge or trial would never have been advocated by leading politicians. Torture would never have been supported by much of the population. And calls for the assassination of a man who leaked documents would never have been heard from leading journalists.

Omar Khadr was not tortured. He may have been hooded, shoved, shackled to a wall, humiliated, threatened with guard dogs, told he was going to be sent to the Middle East for torture, forced into painful stress positions, and deprived of sleep. He may have been warned that another prisoner who had refused to co-operate had been gang-raped to death. But he wasn't tortured.

We've heard variations on this claim all this week, as Khadr's hearing in Guantanamo staggers to its wretched conclusion. American officials did nothing wrong, many say. Khadr wasn't tortured.

Is that true? There are two ways of tackling the question. One is legal analysis. International and national law is emphatic in forbidding torture, but it does not provide a precise, technique-by-technique definition of what is and what is not torture (or "ill treatment," a secondary category of acts that do not rise to the level of torture but are nonetheless forbidden). Agreements and precedents help clarify things. But still, there is plenty of room for argument.

But before we get to the law, we have to investigate the reality and answer the most basic question: What is torture?

"Suppose a terrorist has hidden an atomic bomb on Manhattan Island which will detonate at noon on July 4," wrote philosopher Michael Levin. "Suppose further that he is caught at 10 a.m. of the fateful day, but -- preferring death to failure -- won't disclose where the bomb is. What do we do? If we follow due process -- wait for his lawyer, arraign him -- millions of people will die. If the only way to save those lives is to subject the terrorist to the most excruciating possible pain, what grounds can there be for not doing it? I suggest there are none."

'You don't look at their face, even when you put prods in their mouth," a Chilean torturer said in 1984. "You keep their eyes covered. The secret is not to look into their eyes. The other secret is not to draw blood. You leave that for the sick bastards or the young brutes. You can watch the body arch and bounce under electricity, but never draw blood."