Half a year after the nation thought it had put the torture issue behind it, the ugly word is back. The Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld requires the United States to treat detainees in the campaign against terrorism as if they were covered by the Geneva Conventions. President Bush has proposed legislation to accomplish that.

Part of the legislation refers to the Geneva accords' Common Article 3, which bans "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." Mr. Bush contends that this language requires clarification, so that U.S. military and intelligence personnel will know which interrogation techniques are legal.

We oppose torture, and note that Mr. Bush denies that U.S. interrogators use it. The techniques banned under Common Article 3 are not considered torture, either. The need for clarity arises because some aggressive methods used in a Central Intelligence Agency counter-terrorism program that may have prevented attacks on the U.S. and our allies may or may not fall under the prohibition of Common Article 3 -- depending on how it is analyzed.

The White House proposes legislation to clarify the prohibition to allow, for use on high-value suspects, stress techniques such as sleep deprivation, temperature changes, and loud rock music. We believe that these are important clarifications to make; they would help U.S. interrogators steer clear of actual torture.

Four Republican senators, including John McCain (a Vietnam War war prisoner who was tortured), along with most Democrats, favored an alternative bill that simply adopted the Common Article 3 language. Mr. Bush said that that would kill the useful CIA interrogation program, although he did adopt for his bill Mr. McCain's language in the law passed in January for detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

A compromise that appears to satisfy the needs of both sides now lets the legislation go to the full Congress. It should be passed swiftly.

Let's be realistic. While experts disagree on whether torture works, and surely the same can be said of less aggressive methods, U.S. security cannot rest on methods that amount to polite questioning. Just imagine a nuke hidden in an American city; in seeking to learn its location, who would object even to torture?

We would expect a U.S. president to disobey the law banning torture under such circumstances -- and face a jury later, with confidence.

The current debate does not involve such extreme circumstances, but it could come close. Some terrorism suspects who planned to blow themselves up might resist any interrogation technique; others who welcome a swift death (followed by entry into Paradise) might talk under conditions of, say, discomfort or deprivation far short of torture.

So who knows? Clearly, though, U.S. interrogators need to know what is legal and what is not. We oppose torture but support methods of interrogation that stop short of torture, at least with the most dangerous suspects. We do not think that clarifying Common Article 3 amounts to amending, let alone withdrawing from, the Geneva Conventions. And we do not believe that al-Qaida will chop off heads with any greater alacrity if the language is clarified.

Choosing the words to codify actions ranging from the unpleasant to the inhumane requires delicacy, to say the least. Let us hope, however, that the White House and Congress can summon enough statesmanship to balance the claims of both humanity and national security.