Effect measure has been on top of the story of the "Tripoli Six". Their story is one which combines a host of the threats and anxieties of our age - the Enlightenment pursuit of Reason, and the Romantic demand for equality are under threat from the forces of absolutism. As a Nature editorial puts it:

Tripoli may seem far away, but knowledge and academic freedom are central planks in many other struggles across the world for more open, democratic societies. Academics and universities are often hotbeds of such reform movements, and every year hundreds of academics worldwide consequently face threats, or worse. It is important that we do not forget them.

Prof. Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society calls what is happening judicial murder. The confessions were extracted under torture, because the charges - that the health professionals had deliberately infected children with HIV - were incendiary. It is a sobering reminder of the ticking bomb rationalization's absurdity.

Science in the West went from backward to advanced in the space of a short 150 years from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton. It then lept even farther forward by coming to understand that the same methods which had advanced the study of motion and light, could be applied to chemistry and biology as well. By 1800, Western scientific was on its way to proving Newton's theory of kinematics, establishing a method for studying the untold ages of the earth, and the foundations of the study of the world of compounds and interactions.

But as importantly, it was beginning to apply this knowledge to the lives of everyone - sanitation, epidemiology, mass manufacturing - all took abstract scientific concepts, and applied them in ways which would increase life's span and improve life's quality. This project became life's mission for people such as Florence Nightengale, who created statistical analysis for medicine and William Farr who as compiler of abstracts, created public sanitation record keeping - among a host of others.

Such people often ran astounding risks - by entering the plague striken area, the war zone - this before the Geneva conventions - the sick ward - all of the borderlands between life and death - many died of the very dangers that they sought to protect others from. The health professionals charged in Libya are of the same mettle and the same tradition. Today organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontiers go into the teeth of the epidemic.

This is possible because of the belief in the importance of humanity and human life, and the imperative for using our knowledge to improve both.

One of the other important products of this combination of reason and romanticism is the modern judicial system. Since effects have causes, the evidence should tell a plain tale of events. It is only in a world that believes in magic which evaporates the traces of its action and source, that torture is needed to ascertain truth. It is ironic that in the present two of the most popular television franchises - with several between them, are devoted to the use of Forensic Science - CSI, CSI:Miami and CSI:New York - and police work - Law and Order, Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Criminal Intent.

A reasonable world, rationally within reach of our understanding, has given us both the health professional to protect us from the pathogens of the natural world, and the criminal justice system, which seeks to find the guilty, without destroying the innocent.

Torture cuts the strand that connects our actions with our beliefs - almost by definition, torture involves some who are innocent, or at least innocent of what they are suspected of. It breaks the correlation between guilt and punishment. It breaks the link between acting in the name of human dignity, and the powers granted to protect human life. Torture denies a reasonable world of physical cause and effect, and a world where the forces of order are also the forces of law. Torture is ritual human sacrifice to appease the terrible and invisible gods that beset us with disease and war.

This case is becoming a cause célèbre, because the sanctity of those who enter the borderlands between life and death, and the essential sanctity of a rational world are under threat, not just in Libya, but in other places. Sometimes it takes the abuse of those in other lands of our principles, to come to value them in our own land.