Josef Kauffman
Mr. Martinez
Junior English
14 January 2015 On The Torture of the Nation Torture has been around ever since we had nations. Even though torture was used as punishment by the Ancients, now it is used to collect information from POWs, Prisoners of war.
Even though many sanctions have banned torture from the UN, many large nations implement torture, namely the US, China, and Israel. These countries claim that torture is necessary for the protection of the nation; that it discovers terrorist attacks and plots against the government, and therefore must be applied during times of war. Even though support of these practices from the citizens in the US and Israel have diminished in the last few decades, the CIA and IDF continue to torture POWs or suspected terrorists. These uses of torture however do not defend the country from attacks. The use of torture enforces terrorist groups, provides fake or incomplete information, and is simply immoral, even if the detainee is cruel and dangerous.
As we advance through the ages, we realize more and more the cruelty of war. However, everyone can easily be convinced that it is necessary to fight others who abuse them. In WWII, the Germans would imprison people who helped Jews escape, and torture them to learn where the prisoners took them. This only reinforced their decision to free the Jews however, since it only caused more hate between the prisoner and the torturer. My Grand Uncle Erik was a skipper who brought the Danish Jews to Sweden. He was caught on his return to Copenhagen and brought to a camp called Westphalia, just north of Hamburg. When he came back from
Westphalia, he would never travel to Germany, never buy German products, or carry any

German cargo in his ship. He supported the Communist regime in East Germany, as he said,
“Every man that is empty from food, his son, or his life, is a sign that God blesses me.” The same situations can be seen today in the Middle East. The new fundamentalist group that has risen,
ISIS, believes that God supports their obscene actions. They point out how we torture local peoples from the Middle East that we think have some idea of what is going on in their land. A message from ISIS agent Ali Khurram says, “Americans think that we are afraid of being captured[and tortured], but we have no care for it,” In the Qur’an it says that people who attack others out of fear or hate are idolists, the most evil people in Islam. When people feel morally obligated and encouraged to kill people, they will. And torture is one of those catalysts that drives people to do equally if not worse acts. If we are to truly stop terrorism, we must first not give these people a reason.
As is fear, lying is a part of human nature. We will lie to keep people from the truth, and some people will rather die than give sensitive information. It is also impossible to know for sure if the victim is being honest or is lying. Former FBI agent Ali Soufan says the torture process was “ineffective, slow and unreliable,” (CBS) Soufan goes on to say how they had a more formal interrogation early, which led to “piles of key information” by referring to the prisoner by his childhood name. Pro­torture people like to say that it is crucial to torture during a ‘ticking time­bomb scenario. However, as Prof. Alan Dershowitz points out, “is just a myth. There has been no evidence to say one of these situations has happened let alone the conclusion that torture could have solved this issue.” The reason is that torture gives no motivating reason to give the information. Now others say that talking would not do so either, but that simply isn’t true.
According to the BPS Research Notes of a study done in 2006, “Disclosure was 14 times more

likely to occur early in an interrogation,” The interrogation system of rapport building has been shown multiple times to be much more effective than torture, proving that it is pointless.
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