The Pros And Cons Of Human Torture

They put on a kind of thick jacket, which fastened me to the chair. . . . My chest was so tightened that I couldn’t breathe properly. Plus, the air circulation was worse than the first trip. . . . I was literally suffocating inside the bag around my head. . . . They stuffed the air between my clothes and me with ice cubes from my neck to my ankles, and whenever the ice melted they put in new hard ice cubes. Moreover, every once in a while, one of the guards smashed me, most of the time in the face. The ice served both for pain and for wiping out the bruises I had from that afternoon. . . . Historically, dictators during medieval and pre-medieval times used this method to let the victim die slowly. The other method of hitting the victim while blindfolded in inconsistent intervals of time was used by Nazis during WWII. There is nothing more terrorizing than making somebody expect a smash every single heartbeat.1

There is no question that torture is wrong. It is inherently reprehensible for the CIA to believe that “if you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,”2 or that people, such as Mohamedou Ould Slahi in the above excerpt, should be sent “to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”3 However, Jean Bethke Elsthain argues …show more content…
How can one be absolutely certain that the criminal knows the placement of the bomb? Elsthain admits that “the authorities are as close to 100 percent certain as human beings can be”5 that the terrorist knows where the bomb is. But close to 100 percent is not 100 percent. Torturing an innocent man, or even a guilty man with the possibility of failing to effectively stopping the crime should deter the authorities from committing such an act of moral depravity. But even if the man is guilty and knows the location of the bomb, how can those torturing him be certain he will give up the