I didn't expect a kind of American Inquisition!
Ah, torture. Using physical violence, or threat of same, to get information or confessions from the subjects. It has a rich history, going back to the dawn of our species and, until recently, was regarded as a Bad Thing.
But now we have George W in office, and we have the War on Terror! ™. With those two things in place, torture is suddenly something we’re pretty ok with. Well, provided we’re the ones doing it.
Torturing people is something we’ve outlawed a long time ago, and rightly so. Hell, when the Japanese did it to our soldiers and civilians during World War II, we put some of them on trial and executed them for it. Some of what they were tried for included, surprise, waterboarding.
Now a friend of mine made the point that they were tried for torturing soldiers, not enemy combatants. Ok, so is it ok to torture enemy combatants? Is it ok to just grab someone off the streets of Islamabad because you think they’re someone who might be a terrorist and then torture them to prove it? Is it ok to send them to foreign countries and have them torture them for us, so we don’t have to get our hands dirty?
The answer to all of these questions is, of course, no.
For those who favor torturing suspects, allow me to enlighten you to a little fact about it.
Torture doesn’t work. If you torture someone enough, you can get them to say whatever you want them to. Heck, they’ll start saying whatever they think you want to hear just to get you to stop. That doesn’t give you any sort of reliable information.
Besides, what if you get someone who is actually innocent? Someone who really doesn’t have any involvement in what you think they’ve done? Now you’ve tortured someone who you shouldn’t have. What do you do then? Apologize and hand them a few bucks? Hell, we don’t even like giving money to people we put onto death row for a few years and then find out they’re innocent. We certainly aren’t going to give money to some random taxi-driver we accidentally tortured.
Also, do you really want to live in a country that thinks torture is fine and dandy? Do we really want to have our military personnel trained on how to torture people? Anyhow, where does it stop? If it’s ok to torture suspected terrorists, what about people here in the USA we think might’ve murdered someone?
Some people like to point out the “Ticking Time-Bomb” scenario. I say to those people, “You’ve watched to many episodes of 24.” Here’s a fun thought. Let’s make torture illegal. Completely. Period. No matter what. Realistically, in the unlikely event we find someone who has planted a nuke in a major city and it’s going to go off, and we really need the information like now, well… I’d swing the hammer onto their fingers myself. In the end, if we stop the nuke from going off, the person who gets the information is hailed as a hero, pardoned and allowed to go. But that’s an exceptionaly unlikely series of events, and we cannot base our laws around something like that.
There is nothing good about torture. It is never right. It is never proper. It is something we in this country should never, ever allow. Period.
