Why Torture Is Torture

Torture is something all over the world to inflict punishment and pain to people. The fear of drowning is something a lot of people have. With this being said, this story is based on a torture method called waterboarding. Waterboarding was thought of by members of the Special Forces. It was used in a training called SERE, which means Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. The main things needed for this torture is water, and a board of course. This is why it gets the name waterboarding. The goal of this paper is to insure people that doubt waterboarding is a torture, waterboarding is a torture. In “Believe Me, It’s Torture”, Christopher Hitchens describes waterboarding in order to convince the readers on why it is torture.

In Hitchens’s

“Among the veterans there are at least two views on all this, which means in practice that there are two opinions on whether or not ‘waterboarding’ constitutes of torture.” (620). Being tied up and blind folded against ones will is bad, but not really considered torture. When slowly drowning someone to get something from them gets added to the mix changes it to actually torture. Some believe since screws, hammers, pincers, and other weapons are not used then it is not torture. They also believe that waterboarding does not get results fast enough to be considered torture, so it is just a little tease. “When contrasted to actually torture, ‘waterboarding’ is more like foreplay.” (620). People do not have to use weapons to torture anyone, and waterboarding is a great example of it. The closes thing to a weapon is water and not many people would consider this a weapon. Whether or not people say it is or is not torture, it is safe to say it cannot really be said without experiencing it. Hitchens claims it is torture, and has the right to, because he has firsthand

“But it was something Americans were being trained to resist, not inflict.” (616). Now days, people inflict waterboarding. This is where its purpose comes in. Americans are trained so they can resist it, and now they inflict it to get information from other people. This torture is used by the Special Forces to receive stuff from American enemies, which helps to answer questions one may have. Mastermind of September 11, 2001 “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed … impressed his integrators by holding out for upward of two minutes before cracking.” (618). Eventually he cracked though, giving useful information about the 9-11 incident. So, the purpose of waterboarding, as stated before, is to receive useful information from people to help answer what people