In the first week after the September 11 attacks I met with a former CIA officer to get a sense of exactly what our new war would entail. The subject of torture came up and my source speculated that “the old rules” would return. By the old rules, he explained that terrorists would be abducted, hooded, beaten, and made to squirm in agony.

I did not recoil in horror and write a screed predicting the kinds of widespread torture that have been coming to light for the past year and a half. At the time, with the acrid smoke from the Pentagon still visible across the Potomac River, the prospect of our enemies suffering at the hands of our operatives did not shock my conscience.

It was in this environment that the first regulations governing the treatment of the more than 80,000 detainees in the war were drafted: by human beings reacting to the mass murder of their countrymen. While the loosening of the interrogation rules does not make the men who loosened them sadists, it’s now important to admit that these secret rules have helped spawn a moral crisis.

We now know that prisoners have been hung upside down, beaten to death, exposed to attack dogs and held in solitary confinement in some cases for up to a month at a time. In some cases the victims of this treatment were not high-level terrorists, but taxi drivers and petty criminals. We know that sexual humiliation of prisoners in Abu Ghraib was in part because of excesses by lower levels in the chain of command and the military intelligence officers overseeing their interrogation. In other cases, however there have not been full investigations. Add to this that numerous suspects have been sent to Egyptian, Saudi, and Jordanian jails, where much worse torture is committed.

None of this is to say that all of these excesses were approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Nor do these gruesome facts negate America’s moral superiority to the terrorists who videotape the beheadings of aid workers. But it strains belief to suppose that our side’s torture in multiple countries is unconnected entirely to the web of clandestine edicts developed in 2001 and 2002.

For this reason, it is essential to overturn the secret regulations and fiats that created an environment where the bodies of innocents have been used against their souls, to paraphrase Andrew Sullivan. But it would also be a mistake if in the process of this overturning, clear thinking gave way to the same sort of emotion-charged rule-making that created the environment for the excesses in the first place.

This is at the heart of the debate over the torture amendment proposed by Senator McCain and agreed to by the White House yesterday. In response to the scandals in the current war, the McCain amendment calls for a ban on all cruel, degrading, and inhumane treatment. But this formulation is in many ways too vague. Do stress positions count? What about sleep deprivation? Who will judge what is cruel? Will it be American courts or the United Nations? As Charles Krauthammer notes in his essay on torture in the Weekly Standard, Mr. McCain himself acknowledges that in the case of a ticking time bomb – when a detainee has information that could save lives – “you do what you have to.” If it is permissible to torture in that circumstance, then why propose a ban with no exceptions?

The answer by many of Mr. McCain’s defenders has been to dismiss the ticking time bomb as an impossible hypothetical or a case where a bad case makes bad law. As Michael Kinsley writes in Slate, “Questions like these have been pondered and disputed since the invention of the college dorm, but rarely, until the past couple of weeks, unstoned.”

That is just nonsense. In Iraq, dozens of senior Baathists and Al Qaeda leaders who send explosive-rigged cars and people to police academies and schools with a phone call, know the whereabouts of these ticking time bombs and within reason should be forced and if necessary broken to give their names and locations. A meaningful interrogation policy that spells out exactly what kinds of practices are permissible has the advantage of explicitly banning those that really do shock the conscience.

What Mr. Krauthammer’s critics have failed to recognize is that he has conceded most of the debate to them already. In his essay he proposes that no military personnel be entrusted with making decisions about coercive interrogation, rescuing the pre-September 11 rules spelled out in the Army Field Manual. He proposes to limit harsher treatment to senior terrorists and terrorists with tactical information that could save lives. And he only condones it when it is any way useful to gaining the vital intelligence we need to win our war.

Mr. Sullivan writes, “What the hundreds of abuse and torture incidents have shown is that, once you permit torture for someone somewhere, it has a habit of spreading.” But if the law is too vague and restrictive, it invites the very kind of secret policies that led to these torture scandals in the first place.