The United Convention Of 1949

While the law itself condemns use of torture for any purpose, torture becomes necessary to be used in particular critical instances. According to Miles, the United States senate allowed the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on a number of cases and detainees. The human rights should be considered first in any event whether in interrogation or any other course of action1. The policy makers have found themselves between hard and difficult decisions to make on the techniques for obtaining vital information from terrorists who are trained heavily on resisting from giving information when caught in the wrong side of the law.

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques have their situational uses. One major claim is the lauded Ticking Time Bomb scenario in which the case is laid out in a needs of the many versus the needs of the one format. The premise as given by Bob Brecher is thus, “Suppose there is good reason to think that someone has planted a bomb in a public place. And suppose there is good reason to think that it is going to go off in the next two hours or so, and that it is going to kill and maim dozens of people, maybe hundreds. The question is all too real. Imagine, to bring the example closer to home, that the police or the secret services had known that bombs were shortly to go off somewhere in Bali, Madrid, Lonon or Sharm-el-Sheikh in the attacks of 2004 and 2005. But no one knows where the bomb is – except one person, who is already in custody. Naturally they have no intention of revealing where the bomb is. Maybe they have planted it themselves; maybe not. Either way, they remain silent. Should they be tortured to force them to reveal where the bomb is?”(Torture and the Ticking Bomb 1). In this scenario there is substantial moral justification for torture. Consider this, law enforcement believes that torturing the target will save

The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution says, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” The fundamental idea of torture is to inflict mental or physical pain onto a suspect to coerce them into revealing information we desire. This tactic is illegal because it violates the Constitution, and in addition, it violates international agreements that our nation has committed itself to. The general provisions of the Geneva Conference of 1949 prevent the use of torture in warfare; the document specifically outlaws “Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating or degrading treatment…” By violating these laws, particularly the Constitution, our nation

Interrogational torture is one of the many tough ethical questions that people debate about in the United States. Is it right or is it wrong? Many believe that the United States does not practice intense interrogational acts such as torture. Many people have fought to abolish any form of torture while many fight to keep some forms of it to help keep the peace. Whether you believe in it or not, torture is and will always be an ethical dilemma that comes up.

The CIA used waterboarding as an interrogation method to try to get leaders of Al Qaeda to talk. The dilemma came up when Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda leader, became uncooperative in prison. The George Bush administration held meetings to decide what interrogation methods would be legal. A modern form of waterboarding was deemed acceptable and the most extreme interrogation method listed. According to sources, waterboarding has been used on three top Al Qaeda officials (Ross, 2007). The CIA maintains that this method is effective and completely lawful.

The torture has been used as one of the ways to obtain decisive information from people. The military and intelligence agency paid more attention to psychiatric research than the medical profession. They thought that it would be very effective if they can use psychological factors for interrogation. This technique was secretly developed by the intelligence agencies such as CIA and KGB, but little was known about it.

A new congressional report was released last week detailing the controversial CIA torture program during the years following the September 11 attacks on the twin towers. The report detailed several despicable ways detainees were treated at various CIA black sites, detainees endured waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinements, rectal feeding and death from hypothermia. The most despicable aspect of the report was that psychiatrists, psychologist, and some physicians originated some of the torture techniques used by the CIA.

‘Phycologists find these tactics immoral and beyond torturous, and a ticking time bomb for disaster (O’Donohue).’ Although not everyone disagrees with the tactics Research has shown that these interrogations both have pros and cons. Research from the Phycological association shows that these types of interrogations “betrays trust and human rights, professional ethics and the society's trust (Pope).” For example, many believe that the interrogations break the Miranda rights per the 5th amendment, but others argue that the 5th amendment rights should be reserved only for people holding a valid US citizenship. (Rychlak) Medical ethics of the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, because these facilities are not on US soil the 5th Amendment rights should also apply to these detainees that are detained, making it a national policy. (Quinn) After the 9/11 attacks congress authorized president Bush to authorize “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons’ (Worthington).” However, this was quickly shut down by former

The form of torture interrogation began in response to the 9/11 attacks, just as the United States was entering 2 wars in the Middle East. But no information was ever gained from the tortures. In the torture report, it is stated, “The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation of detainees”. This means, this form of interrogation did not find any information or

The current policies on interrogation standards are per “Executive Order 13491—Ensuring Lawful Interrogations states on Sec. 2. Definitions. “Convention Against Torture, means the convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, December 10, 1984, 1465 U.N.T.S. 85, S. Treaty Doc. No. 100 20 (1988).” OBAMA 2009

In the wake of 9/11 the Central Intelligence Agency was given the authority by George W. Bush and his administration to initiate a covert war against Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda network. He signed a series of directives to capture, detain and extract information from Qaeda and other terrorist suspects from 2002 to 2008 (McCoy 2005). The enhanced interrogation was kept hidden to the public until the release of a 500-page executive summary in late 2014. However, the full CIA Inspector general’s office has admitted having “mistakenly” destroyed their only extensive disclosed 6,700 page classified report(Radsan 2010). CIA’s sources did although describe six enhanced interrogation techniques instituted and used on top suspects, the list includes: (Ross and Richard

Thesis: The role of the United Nations has changed from being primarily an international peacekeeping force to primarily a humanitarian organization.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has used many different torture techniques to gain information from its detainees since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and some of the most common are stress positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. These techniques, among many others, were released in a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on December 9, 2014.

D. Marks, a graduate of Cornell University and a fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, whom worked five years in the U.S. State Department and has written several works regarding CIA operations. The purpose of this book is to inform the reader - through a concise and chronological text - on the hundreds of experiments conducted for mind-control and chemical interrogation research. The book’s research comes directly from the 16,000 pages of CIA documents that were declassified under the Freedom of Information Act in 1977, as well as featuring anecdotal evidence from interviews to written testimonies by scientists and personnel conducted on during the experiments. However, the testimonies may not be accurate, as with much of the information provided by the CIA in 1977. A large portion of the information has been blacked out and withheld. No significant bias can be determined by the text. However, the work is highly valuable for research, as it best summarizes the 16,000 documents released by the

Torture has been around for a very long time. Military leader Napoleon wrote an anti-torture letter in 1798 saying, "The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know." The interrogation methods are a problem for many reasons. One, the methods waste time. Secondly, there are other ways to get information besides torture. If the CIA is clever, they could acquire more information, and faster. A student of Australia’s Charles Sturt University conducted a study on what methods work in the CIA. She interviewed thirty-four interrogators and found that disclosure was fourteen times as likely in a situation that was of physical comfort, and it was