Torture
According to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, torture is any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession. Many people today, would say that they are against any sort of torture; I am one of those people. I feel as though, no matter how much torture you inflict upon one person, it will ultimately not solve any of your problems.
When people are being tortured, their mind tends to be taken over. It is almost as though they have no control in what they do or say. Normally, the person who is doing the torturing, also known as the torturer, tries to convince the tortured to admit to the acts that they may or may not of committed in the first place. Most of the time, the idea of torture is to try and get information out of someone yet sometimes the opposite happen, the opposite being that the person being tortured would stay silent in hopes for the torture to end sooner. In movies and in various stories, we see that the bad guys are always after the good guys, who they just assume are bad. Therefore, the wrong guys are always the ones being caught and tortured. John McCain says on page 697 that “...to defeat our enemies we need intelligence, but intelligence that is reliable. We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps, our war effort. In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear – whether it is true or false – if he believes it will relieve his suffering.” The person being tortured will majority of the time always say what the torturer wants to hear just because of the peer pressure they are being put under.
In many cases, the tortured are forced to take the role of the person that they are not being blamed of being. For example, people in the military are all forced to put on the face of someone who they are not. People go to be in the military for the reason that they all want to help protect their countries. McCain says on page 698 that “the mistreatment of prisoners harms us more than our enemies.” Many veterans always try to forget that traumatic experiences that they all individually have at war. Being at war is torture enough for them; the last thing they would all want is to come back from fighting at war and to have to talk about everything.
There is one thing that veterans and the tortured have in common, they both experience posttraumatic stress disorder. Soldiers tend to feel anxious because the behavior of the torturer is arbitrary and, unpredictable and inhumanly regular. On page 698, McCain says, “Nor do I care if in the course of serving their ignoble cause they suffer great harm. They have pledged their lives to the intentional destruction of innocent lives, ad they have earned their terrible punishment in this life and the next.” Not only are the people being punished suffering and being tortured, but the men and women fighting are also being tortured. They are being forced to live with themselves for the rest of their lives after killing many people.
Throughout everyone’s lives, we all experience some form of torture at least once. No one deserves to be tortured, and no individual deserves to be the person enforcing the torture. Nothing good ever comes from the concept of torture. People who are tortured are put under peer pressure in order to conform to what the torturer wants to here.
Bibliography:
McCain, John. “Torture’s Terrible Toll” Patterns For College Writing Editors Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. New York: Beford/St. Martins, 2010. 696-700
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