Opinion
True democracies should not practice torture
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Also by Wasim Salman:
- China deserves to act in its best interests (April 16, 2008)
- Putting race into perspective (April 3, 2008)
- True democracies should not practice torture (March 12, 2008)
- American faith not going anywhere (February 27, 2008)
- Moral boundaries needed in research (February 13, 2008)
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Last week, President George Bush vetoed a bill that would limit the CIA’s use of “specialized interrogation procedures.” The procedures that would have been banned for use by the CIA include methods such as waterboarding (simulated drowning), making a prisoner stand wet and naked in a cold cell, making prisoners stand for more than 40 hours at a time and sensory deprivation.
Had the bill passed, the CIA would have been restricted to interrogation methods outlined in the Army’s field manual. Mr. Bush justified this veto by stating, “This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe.”
To suggest actions such as waterboarding and sensory deprivation have “a proven track record of keeping America safe” is pure delusion. In actuality, these “specialized interrogation procedures” do nothing more than extract generally false and unreliable information. Alfred W. McCoy provides a perfect example of the ineffectiveness of torture versus humane tactics in his book “A Question of Torture.” Mr. McCoy details a case in which the FBI received more accurate information and cooperation by treating prisoners in Afghanistan humanely than the CIA did using torturous techniques. This alone discredits any view that would deem these ridiculous methods justifiable.
Those who attempt to endlessly justify these dangerous and ridiculous means of retrieving information will inevitably point to a “ticking bomb” scenario. This scenario creates the hypothetical of a bomb about to go off in a major metropolitan area, and the government has a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Is it then all right to torture? Logically, the only answer must be no.
First of all, if a bomb set to go off, then the prisoner has succeeded, and has most likely accepted that he is going to die, so to apply torture here would only strengthen his resolve. Secondly, because the timeframe is so short, he will most likely give false information just to make the torture stop. Finally, it has been proven that in reality, humane means grant the captor more reliable information. If a “ticking bomb” scenario were to arise and the captor were to resort to torture, he would deserve the title of traitor.
Torture cannot be counted on to supply good information, and it can also destroy a prisoner’s mental state and cause irreparable harm. Techniques such as sensory deprivation and waterboarding are designed to reduce an adult’s well-developed state of mind to that of an infant. When the CIA and various psychologists were developing modern sensory deprivation techniques in the mid-20th century, they would test these techniques on normal adults. The data found showed that just a few hours of complete sensory deprivation induced severe hallucinations resulting from a state of mild psychosis. The longer the experiments were held, the more their effects lingered on in the patients’ lives.
We must also remember the effects of torture do not only degrade the minds and lives of the prisoner, but they also degrade the society as a whole, especially when that society is a democracy. Democracies cannot maintain their structures of justice while simultaneously committing such inhumane acts. To treat the enemy humanely, regardless of whether the enemy does the same, is a key tenet of any liberal society.
We, living in the United States of America, cannot hold ourselves as the beacon of development and freedom as long as we allow such inhumane methods of interrogation to continue, especially when the information extracted only hinders the just cause of domestic security. Mr. Bush committed a great sin against democracy when he vetoed this bill. Those who support such methods can never call themselves patriots.
Wasim Salman (salman@wisc.edu) is a senior majoring in international relations.
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“We must also remember the effects of torture do not only degrade the minds and lives of the prisoner, but they also degrade the society as a whole, especially when that society is a democracy.”
This is the factor in why torture should not be allowed, not the other points brought up in this article. I find the moral argument quite ridiculous, looked at with a relative scope. The American presence in the Middle East kills innocents everyday. Why is there less moral outcry for this than for torture? I am sure if you were to ask an Iraqi, would you like to be die an extremely painful death or would you like to be waterboarded, they would choose the torture. We seem to have lost this sense of reality and believe that torture is worse than death, it is not. However, because as you said and I copied above, the whole entire world believes that torture is worse than death and thus to implement it would hurt our standing in the world and would thus be bad for America. We must not torture.
Liberal bed-wetting propaganda like this is torture enough. We surrender! - Germain Q. Stemme
America doesn’t practice torture, Wasim… which is why we destroyed Saddam’s torture chambers, Uday’s rape rooms and are (today) bombing al-Qaeda torture chambers in Iraq (see hyperlink below). http://patdollard.com/2008/03/air-strike-destroys-torture-house/
America does not “torture”, contrary to your specious enemy propaganda. If waterboarding is “torture”, then how do US Special Ops trainees regularly endure it?
This pathetic handwringing is less about waterboarding than about Islamo-fascist apologists (of Wasim’s ilk) bedwetting at the prospect of American victory in Iraq.
I’m sorry, but not since Princeton Professor Peter Singer explained that we should give as good as we get from dogs who hump our legs, have I been so exasperated with the way pseudo-intellectual Islam-fascism apologists think they should use their head for a colonoscopy and then crab-walk across the public stage of wacademia expecting folks to think their new hats make them look smart. And, as with Professor Singer’s efforts to get pet stores to carry Viagra, I have a very hard time taking Wasim seriously anymore; because I’m not sure taking him seriously helps anybody.
We must also not forget that the Israeli military has committed grevous acts of torture every day since 1948. They systematically torture and rape and murder the Palestinians daily in there prisons. And the world is dismally silent about this. Is the Badger Herald run by Jews that they would completely ignore such undisputable facts?
Wasim,
The United States of America government system is not organized as a ‘true democracy’. We have a Representative Republic, where each Citizen is expected to vote for ‘representatives’ that will act in the Citizens interest at local, state, and federal levels of government.
When the headline of an article contains factual errors, it becomes difficult to give credence to any part of the article.
Words have meaning…. Accurate use of words is basic to journalism.
“Those who support such methods can never call themselves patriots.” You shouldn’t be so hard on Speaker Pelosi, who, as you know, was briefed about the moistening of the three terrorists in 2002. At the time, when elections were not on the horizon, Speaker Pelosi asked whether we were being tough enough. As to whether the moistening worked then; it did. Now, defending our great country against threats is patriotic, even if it involves getting a terrorist’s face wet. Mislabeling a few unpleasant interrogation methods as “torture” for either political or editorial argument purposes does not make it so. Neither does implicit exaggeration about the scope of using harsh interrogation methods bolster your argument. Finally, I think you might be worrying a bit much about the “well-developed state of mind” of the three brutally evil terrorists who were dampened. These terrorists have no redeeming qualities. Your concern about inducing a “mild psychosis” on them is misplaced as they have already been thoroughly Islamicized. We had nothing to do with that. P.S. These guys played important roles in murdering thousands of your fellow citizens. They did so without provocation. (Please don’t go off on some psuedo intellectual Marxist-Imperialist theory of explaining why U.S. policies led them to their actions).
Yeah, no torture - just cut off their heads.
Torture is completely justified. If one of our own was caught by those insurgent and terrorist bastards we would be tortured, filmed and then killed just for their propaganda. Just because you have sympathy to your brethern in the middle east does not mean they have any compassion for you or the United States.
There’s no moral equivalence between a terrorist and those who act to defend against those terrorists, whether they use torture, bombing, or guns.
Once a person initiates murderous acts against others he has demonstrated his inhumanity, and no longer deserves to be treated humanely.
Whether torture is effective is a valid question, but it is certainly moral in cases where it is used against known killers in order to defend innocent lives.
It is the killer who is at fault for placing innocent people’s lives at risk by failing to cooperate.
The United States does use torture methods. I’m not going to rehash Abu Ghraib, but that alone was disgusting. President Bush vetoing a bill to limit, (control, monitor, bear moral responsibility) torture doesn’t surprise me. Check this out:
“It can be safely assumed that Bush was neither shocked nor disgusted. The White House and the Pentagon had known about these atrocities for months and had done all they could to prevent them from being exposed.
As for the claim that torture at the US concentration camps is a crime carried out by just a handful of depraved military police reservists, it is disproved by the very existence of the photographs.” From: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/may2004/tort-m03.shtml
Apparently, Bush claimed the actions at Abu Ghraib “shocked” and “disgusted” him. Not appalled enough to ensure it never happened again, however.
PS: About the Special Ops comment, I think one must undergo arduous training to become Special Ops. Just because a prisoner has access to information, doesn’t mean he/she has the endurance to withstand hours of torture that a Special Ops commando would. I’d hope their training consisted of building physical stamina and not a Scantron test and a #2 pencil.