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why torture is unethical in the united states
why torture is justified
why torture is justified
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In reference to its origin, on August 1st, 2002 a memorandum was sent from Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, with the Office of Legal Counsel in the US Justice Department to Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to the president. The memo was written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance with the purpose to provide President Bush with a rationale and justification on the use of torture on potential Al Qaeda terrorists in order to extract information. The value of the source lies in the fact that the memo derived straight from the US Government and was drafted by President Bush’s legal advisors therefore contains reliable information. Since the document was never supposed to be revealed to the public, it provides a behind the scenes look into the intentions of the US government and how they felt at the time, which then makes the source very valuable. However since the purpose of the memo was to advise President Bush that the use of torture on Al Qaeda terrorists should be justified, the persuasive nature of the memo could lead to certain information being withheld to increase the argument’s strength, which then becomes a limitation.
Source 2: Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
In reference to the origin, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib is a documentary film, directed by Rory Kennedy and first aired on HBO in 2007. This documentary examines the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and was produced for the purpose of informing and giving viewers an inside look on the truth behind the scandal. The fact that Kennedy interviews and uses first hand accounts of soldiers who used to work at Abu Ghraib prison and also of those who were detained and tortured increases its value since it presents two sides of the story from opposing viewpoints. Raw footage and ...
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From the evidence presented and the analysis, it would be fair to conclude that the ill-treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison stemmed from a combination of failure on Bush’s administration, as well as a lack of moral judgment and sensibility on the members of the military unit station at the prison. Official government memos provide evidence that top officials did in fact authorize the use of torture to extract information from detainees but the nature of the photographs make us question whether the soldiers enjoyed carrying out the abuses. However if one were to take sides, the actions of low-ranking soldiers could only be held accountable based on the actions of their authorities and leadership, therefore the majority of the blame of the incident at Abu Ghraib should be attributed to the higher ranking officials on the Bush administration.
“President Bush has stated that about a hundred detainees were held under the Central Intelligence Agency secret detention program, about a third of whom were questioned using “enhanced interrogation techniques. The CIA has a way of very publicly blowing their cover seeming to pop up wherever turmoil, and political problems arise. The CIA exists to prevent threats, its operations involve covert actions or spying through various means to gather critical intelligence data. The CIA dates back to 1947. The qualifications and skills are above average. The job of the CIA is to anticipate and quickly assess rapidly evolving international developments and their impact, both positive and negative, on US policy concerns. When researching the career of
McCraw, David, and Stephen Gikow. “The End to a Unspoken Bargain? National Security and Leaks in a Post-Pentagon Papers World.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 48.2 (2013): 473-509. Academic OneFile. Web. 5 Dec. 2013.
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, a senior writer at U.S. News and World, published her article, "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism," in 2004. She uses the article to briefly overview the scandal as a whole before diving into what can trigger sadistic behavior. The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal took place in 2004, wherein American troops humiliated and tortured Iraqi detainees (Szegedy-Maszak 75). The main objective of Szegedy-Maszak’s article is to investigate the causation behind sadistic behavior, exclusively in the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. She effectively does so by gathering information and research from professional psychologists and professors of psychology, specifically Herbert Kelman and Robert Okin (Szegedy-Maszak 76). She finds
On September 11, 2001, this country was under attack and thousands of Americans died at the hands of terrorists. This action caused the U.S. Military to invade Iraq because of the idea that this country was involved in harboring terrorist and were believed to have weapons of mass destruction. This was an executive order that came down from our government, for us to go in and attack Iraq while searching for those who were responsible for the death of American lives. This war brought in many prisoners whom were part of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, whom the military took into custody many of its lower level members to get tips in capturing higher level members. During the detainees stay at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, many of these prisoners
Ex-president George W. Bush asserts, “Abu Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States -- an attack about which we had no previous information.” Abu Zubaydah was a high-ranking Al Qaeda official who was water boarded (Luban, 1). Water boarding is a form torture that simulates drowning. Through this form of torture, the US was able to receive vital information that led to the prevention of a bomber decimating a bridge. Moreover, the CIA was able to extract this information and incarcerate the criminal. Though many lives were potentially saved, Bush was criticized for allowing the action of torture. He se...
soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib, 20 miles west of Baghdad. The prisoners were stripped, made to wear bags over their heads, and sexually humiliated while the guards laughed and took photographs. This situation has a lot in common with the Stanford Prison Experiment. In both situations they’re very similar. For the prisoners at the Stanford Prison experiment to even use the bathroom they had to be blindfolded so they could not find any escape routes and know the way out. There was a hole in the wall at then end of the “court yard” that held a video recorder which would video tape everything that was going on. Including the pornographic and emotional abuse of the prisoners. There was also a rumored escape that a guard overheard the prisoners talking about. They roped their prisoners together and put bags over their heads and walked them all to a small room until the suspected people to break them out showed up. In the end it was all just a rumor. No one came to save the prisoners. The way that the guards fought back was making the prisoners do unethical and repulsive tasks. Their disgusting tasks ended up going as far as making the prisoners scrub the toilets with their own
...n most commonly as water-boarding. One of the cases noted in the film concerns Abi Faraj al-Libbi whos was tortured with the use of water-boarding, and “confessed” to links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. This completely untrue evidence was used in Colin Powell’s infamous speech to the United Nations to justify the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Is the intentional pain that an individual experiences justified if there is the potential to save the lives of many? Torture is the most used weapon in the “war against terrorism” but does it work? The purpose of this essay is to identify what the motives for torturing are, the effectiveness of torture, and important issues with the whole process of torture.
Torture may be an inhumane way to get the information needed to keep the citizens of the United States safe from the attacks that are threatened against them, but there is rarely a course of action that will ensure the safety of a nation’s citizens that doesn’t compromise the safety of another group of people. Nevertheless, we must conserve as much humanity as possible by looking at the situation we are in and ensure that we are approaching the torture in an ethical manner. Although torture is valid on moral grounds, there are many who oppose it, such as Jamie Mayerfeld as he states in his 2009 article “In Defense of the Absolute Prohibition of Torture”.
... Sept. 11th, 2001, terrorist attack on theWorld Trade Center and the unreliability of U.S. intelligence onWeapons of mass Destruction in Iraq have been a focus of intense scrutiny in the U.S. in 2004 particularly in the context of the 9/11 Commision , the continuing armed resistance against U.S. occupation of Iraq, and the widely perceived need for systematic review of the respective roles of the CIA, FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. On July 9th, 2004 the Senate report of Pre-war Intelligenceon Iraq of the Senate Intelligence Committe stated that the CIA described the danger presented by Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq in an unreasonable way, largely unsupported by the available intelligence. In a briefing held Sept 15th, 2001 George Tenet presented the Worldwide Attack Matrix, a "top-secret" document describing covert CIA anti-terror operations in 80 countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The actions, underway or being recommended, would range from "routine propaganda to lethal covert action in preparation for military attacks". The plans, if carried out, "would give the CIA the broadest and most lethal authority in its history".
Mazzetti, Mark, Julian E. Barnes, Edward T. Pound, David E. Kaplan, and Linda Robinson. "Inside the Iraq Prison Scandal. (cover story)" EbscoHost. N.p., 24 Oct. 2004. Web. 21 Mar. 2014.
In the article, “The Torture Myth,” Anne Applebaum explores the controversial topic of torture practices, focused primarily in The United States. The article was published on January 12, 2005, inspired by the dramatic increase of tensions between terrorist organizations and The United States. Applebaum explores three equality titillating concepts within the article. Applebaum's questions the actual effectiveness of using torture as a means of obtaining valuable information in urgent times. Applebaum explores the ways in which she feels that the United States’ torture policy ultimately produces negative effects upon the country. Applebaum's final question is if torture is not optimally successful, why so much of society believes it works efficiently.
“To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity” Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa. To start off I'm going to be talking about two very tragic events that occurred, one of them being the My Lai massacre and the other one being the prison torture and abuse scandal in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I will go into further detail in answering the following questions, what are some key differences? Who is most responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib? does Abu Ghraib, as well as incidents involving rape and killings of civilians in Iraq suggest that we haven't learned our lessons of My Lai? And lastly what needs to be
After 9-11 George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the CIA used loopholes to torture the suspects after the attack. Al Qaeda terrorists were not classified under prisoners of war and there was a genuine concern of other attacks to follow (Yoo 1). Under these interpretations and bending of the laws Bush was legal and justified in the actions taken. The Bush administration picked waterboarding as their main force when torturing the masterminds behind the attacks. Waterboarding was picked because they had been training special force teams and tens of thousands of other soldiers before the attacks, and it was stated that they
We are truthful and forthright, and we provide information and analysis without institutional or political bias” (Central Intelligence Agency, 2015), the International Committee of the Red Cross also found in 2007 that “the ill-treatment that detainees were subjected to whilst held in CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture” (International Committee of the Red Cross, 2007), a sentiment that was further supported by President Barack Obama’s acknowledgement that the US government did employ the use of torture in Guantanamo Bay (Human Rights Watch, 2004).The insidious nature and dishonest conduct of these actions exemplify how evil is often performed within institutions that rely on the fundamental appearance of good to mask their actions. The social and political acceptance of torture would not exist on its own, it has to be part of a governmental entity that has a source of good within it. This is what makes it institutionally evil – its success relies on power, even though society understands that the torture is inherently wrong. The source of this institutional evil is the free will that all humans have, however, as good people, we also have the free will to promote justice, not just for the victims, but for the perpetrators. By heeding the call of the bible to overcome evil with goodness and compassion, the oppression the CIA is instilling can be