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 ([email protected]) is a senior
majoring in international relations.