On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture." Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush's statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that "you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother." Arar, a thirty-four-year-old graduate of McGill University whose family emigrated to Canada when he was a teen-ager, was arrested on September 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy Airport. He was changing planes; he had been on vacation with his family in Tunisia, and was returning to Canada. Arar was detained because his name had been placed on the United States Watch List of terrorist suspects. He was held for the next thirteen days, as American officials questioned him about possible links to another suspected terrorist. Arar said that he barely knew the suspect, although he had worked with the man's brother. Arar, who was not formally charged, was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet. The plane flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan. During the flight, Arar said, he heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." The Americans, he learned, planned to take him next to Syria. Having been told by his parents about the barbaric practices of the police in Syria, Arar begged crew members not to send him there, arguing that he would surely be tortured. His captors did not respond to his request; instead, they invited him to watch a spy thriller that was aired on board. Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, "just began beating on me." They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. "Not even animals could withstand it," he said.
In the eighty-five pages play, Lafferty, Sherlock, and Wood exert their utmost effort to document, organize, and reconstruct a collage of verbatim testimonies, reports, and interviews eyewitnesses of the Syrian Revolution .The interviews were conducted by Laffery in collaboration with veteran war correspondents: Sherlock and Wood. Lafferty and colleagues conducted interviews incognito with ordinary people, activists, businesspersons, defectors, Free Syrian Army soldiers, and medical staff. Subsequently, Lafftery not only edited and adapted the play for theatre performance, but also directed it. The three compliers risked their personal safety and arranged to be covertly smuggled into the Syrian precarious land. Were they caught, they would have been, unquestionably, exposed to the horrendous Syrian torture, killing machine. The Assad regime banned Western media, and journalists no longer had any immunity. They could have been a legitimate target of any attack.
Who wouldn’t have agreed? Yes, torture is cruel but it is less cruel than the substitute in many positions. Killing Hitler wouldn’t have revived his millions of victims nor would it have ended war. But torture in this predicament is planned to bring no one back but to keep faultless people from being sent off. Of course mass murdering is far more barbaric than torture. The most influential argument against using torture as a penalty or to get an acknowledgment is that such practices ignore the rights of the particulars. Michael Levin’s “The Case for Torture” discusses both sides of being with and being against torture. This essay gets readers thinking a lot about the scenarios Levin mentioned that torture is justified. Though using pathos, he doesn’t achieve the argument as well as he should because of the absence of good judgment and reasoning. In addition to emotional appeal, the author tries to make you think twice about your take on
...en were left with nine hostages. They were, in addition to Gutfreund, sharpshooting coach Kehat Shorr, track and field coach Amitzur Shapira, fencing master Andre Spitzer, weightlifting judge Yakov Springer, wrestlers Eliezer Halfin and Mark Slavin, and weightlifters David Berger and Ze'ev Friedman. David Berger was an expatriate American with dual citizenship and Mark Slavin, the youngest of the hostages, had only arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union a few months before the Olympic Games began. Gutfreund, physically the largest of the hostages, was bound to a chair whilst the rest were lined up on the two beds in Springer and Shapira's room, and bound at the wrists and ankles and then to each other. Romano's bullet-riddled body was left at his bound teammates’ feet as a warning, to show what would happen if any of them attempted to escape as their friends had.
In North Vietnam in 1970 several soldiers, sailors and airman were killed, beaten, starved and confined in solitary confinement causing severe mental issues in prisons in North Vietnam. Many of the American Prisoners were pilots for the Army and Air Force shot down during the heavy bombing raids ordered by President Johnson in 1964. 1 For nearly 2,000 days, or six plus years many of these Americans imprisoned in Son Tay about 23 miles west of Hanoi in North Vietnam. After several reports to the Pentagon from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National security Agency (NSA), one of the greatest orchestrated prison rescue attempt was coordinated in a joint effort by the armed services. This operation exhibited extreme planning and attention to detail that forever changed the North Vietnamese treatment of American Prisoners of War (POWs).2
Levin wants to change the negative views that society placed on torture so that, under extreme circumstances torture would be acceptable. He begins his essay with a brief description of why society views the topic of torture as a negative thing. He disagrees with those views, and presents three different cases in which he thinks torture must be carried out with provides few reasons to support his claim. He uses hypothetical cases that are very extreme to situations that we experience in our daily lives. From the start, Levin makes it perfectly clear to the reader that he accepts torture as a punishment. He tries to distinguish the difference between terrorists, and victims in order stop the talk of terrorist “right,” (648). Levin also explains that terrorists commit their crimes for publicity, and for that reason they should be identified and be tortured. He ends his essay by saying that torture is not threat to Western democracy but rather the opposite (Levin
...own case involving extraordinary renditions is the case of a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar. Arar was apprehended by U.S. officials for supposedly having connections to al Qaeda. He was deported to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured. In 2009, documents released by the Obama administration reveal that the Bush administration ordered the use of torture against to al Qaeda suspects an alleged 266 times (Breehner).
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...
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”.
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.
In Module one, I learned that terrorism is a result of physical harm or deadly acts of force with the intent of a political outcome by the use of terror for coercion. There are various types of terrorism such as international terrorism and domestic terrorism. International terrorism occurs outside of the United States with a purpose to influence the policy of a government by intimidation. International and Domestic terrorism both involve violent acts dangerous to human life that violate federal and state laws. Domestic terrorism occurs within the United States with the intention of coercion or intimidation by way of mass destruction, etc. Some forms of terrorism include Improvised explosive devices (IED), kidnappings, suicide bombings and
Every mother feel the pain of how they are taking her children from her and to not seeing him anymore. While that they putting them in captivity most of them got hurt because they way that they are bringing them it's not easy to pull them from sea and putting them in small place to captive them, and some of them had scratch in their body. This is the second consequence of how they hurting them in certain ways and how that painful for their
Wood, Connor. “Religious terrorism: an evolutionary explanation.” Patheos.com. Patheos, 3 Apr 2012. Web. 15 Oct 2013.
America’s Use of Torture in Interrogations of Suspected Terrorists Violates Human Rights by Lisa Hajjar
Journalist interview re: Abu Ghraib prison abuses: Eleven answers to eleven questions. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University.