The Tickling time scenario is one good example whereby torture can be justified. In this case, it is justifiable for torture to be used on a terrorist who, in his custody, has refused to divulge critical and crucial information in his possession regarding the exact location of a weapon that can be used for mass destruction or a time bomb which may explode any time. Even though many nations do not allow torture of victims, such a situation can be justified to force a terrorist to divulge critical information that can otherwise, if not released on time, be detrimental to the whole community or world. Such a circumstance can lead any nation, which feels threatened, to permit the use of torture
The French liberals for instance were forced to justify the use of torture when there emerged a possibility of massive destruction of innocent lives. And the fact that terrorist always torture their captured victims makes it justifiable for the rule of “an eye for an eye” to be applied. They should therefore be subjected to the same method they use on their victims (Darius 12).
Torture refers to intentional agony which is caused to someone, resulting to the suffering of his or her heart. It can also be said to be an intentional action aimed at coercing people to volunteer information. This unnatural act of torturing people for the purpose of extracting confessions has been widely condemned by many human rights organizations all over the world. The purpose of torture is often known as a way of punishing, obtaining confessions or information, creating fear in an individual or as a means of revenge. The most common methods of torture include and are not limited to electric shocks, submersion in deep waters, suffocation of the victim, sexual assaulting of the victim like for instance raping, beatings and even stretching the victims (Popkin 45).
Torture should be justified in extreme cases because, in an event whereby the lives of millions of people is at stake, and it is proved beyond doubt that a prisoner or prisoners has or have relevant information that can evade this loss, then it will be justifiable that such people be subjected to torture so that the lives can be saved. Leaving millions of people to die just because of not subjecting an individual person to reveal vital information that can lead to prevention of their deaths cannot be justified by anyone who has right thinking minds (Popkin 45). Torture should therefore be used to acquire information which can be live saving. A terrorist who plants a bomb in a city which will go off in an hours time causing millions of people to die, will of course, when captured be subjected to torture if it can be proved beyond reasonable doubt that he knows where the bomb is and he is not willing to talk. It will be against the interest of the majority if the captured terrorist, holding key information concerning a planned attack, is left to enjoy peace at the expense of many people. In this situation, it is important to subject the person to torture in order to reveal information so as to salvage lives.
Torture should be administered because, this highly coercive interrogation is the best remedy for people who are arrested regarding heinous crimes. Torture warrants should therefore be issued through regulated procedures where interrogators can request them so that they are not used in excess. Torture should be used in situations in which there is enough evidence that human lives can be saved. It is therefore wrong for people to claim that the use of torture does not work at all because the other end of the scale does not work. Torture should be used and advocated in cases when the suffering of only one individual person especially one who is a position to enact crimes of terror against other people, is equivalent to the saving of millions of peoples lives (Landay 56).
People who oppose torture argue that it should not be administered because it an illegal and unreliable method of soliciting information from the victims. Torture is in many cases is misused when the people administering it use it as a way of terrorizing some specific societies or their populations instead of using its intended purpose of soliciting the information from their victims. The use by the French colonial regimes of using preventative torture on the Algerian citizens resulted in the death of around 1.5 million Algerians with their claims that it was intended to save lives. In most cases, it always turns out that most of the torture victims are always innocent because of a result of mistaken identity. They therefore argue that, there is no moral or legal justification in the use of torture (Wisnewski 343).
It has also been proven beyond doubt that in most cases, victims of torture, when subjected towards these inhuman conditions, will be liable to make up anything so that the pain they are being subjected to is stopped. Indeed, the victims are unable to differentiate between fiction and fact because of the pressure and the intense psychological pressure they have been subjected to. The terrorists may also, with the knowledge that the timer is running, opt to divulge wrong or false information to the interrogators so that the bomb goes of and the terrorist wins.
Torture should be administered because people, like enemy combatants and terrorists, should have already been proved to be guilty already and therefore such people, who have been proved guilty and there is a strong believes that they hold key information that could be of importance to the whole nation should be subjected to torture. It is therefore in the best interest of any nation that such people who hold information like for instance locations of prospected attacks are tortured so that important information regarding this future attacks can be given to intelligence authorities to take action (Carlson 23). This is the only sure way that can be used to gather crucial information from known and suspected terrorist people.
Terrorism should be used because the terrorists are always known to have extreme and strong ideological roots. Such terrorists have been indoctrinated against betraying their groups or easily reveal information about their activities and therefore torture is the best tool that can be used against such people so that the only option they will have is to reveal information which could not otherwise have been given during the normal techniques of interrogation. Torture should also be used in situations where the amount of time left before a terrorist attack is limited because vital and accurate information can be quickly obtained.
Opponents of torture argue that torture should not be used because it is ineffective like in the case of the terrorist gangs because these gangs are well organized to a certain extent that unless the captured person is very senior in the ranks of the organization, then no information regarding the entire working or senior members of the group could be revealed (Lang 101). If the person (s) captured is a footman, then there is very low possibilities that torturing such a person could yield any vital information. This means, people who are not guilty are subjected to psychological and physical harm. Threats to public safety should never be rushed when gathering information because in most cases, it leads to obtaining of irrelevant and inaccurate information and raises the possibility of even loosing more life (Head 11).
Secondly, there are several groups that observe that it is a serious offense to torture people. They also maintain that it violates the rights of people, which goes against international law. To back up their claim, they quote article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights. The article prohibits use of torture in whatever form. This might seem convincing, but it does not provide a solution to the loss of life that results from loss of live due to terrorist activities (Greenberg 117).
The second reason why torture should be used is that, it has great benefits which can be justified by many historical examples. A lot of benefits arising from the use of torture in different circumstances can be well cited in different scenarios. In Iraq, a total of 11,611 fatalities were reported to have occurred between a period of 2000-2006 as a result of car bombs and other detonations of this kind (Carlson 23). A lot of lives could be saved if the suspects could be captured and forced to reveal the identities of the people involved and the mechanism that are used in such a practice. The use of torture in Iraq’s second war in 2003 in the Abu Ghraib jails led to the detention and subsequent execution of the Former Iraq President Adam Hussein.
The military people and the CIA personnel confined the suspects in cramped quarters, beat them up and used other methods of torture so that they could reveal the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein who was feared as a threat to world peace and who was believed to have hidden weapons of mass destruction. This use of torture yielded positive results since at the end Saddam was captured and hanged as a result of his crimes against humanity. Torture was therefore the only way through which the CIA could have obtained the relevant information about Saddam Hussein because under normal circumstances, no one in Iraq could have volunteered to give any information regarding the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein (Wisnewski 345). According to Wisnewski (356) “there are circumstances in which any morally sensitive individual should use the interrogators for purposes of physical intimidation deprivation of sleep and denial of creature comforts in order to obtain vital information”.
The idea of torturing suspect so that they can confess or provide useful information has not been justified conclusively. However, as we have seen in the above scenario, torturing is helpful if it can lead to saving lives of innocent people (Sandel 17). Its is a fact that many countries all over the world do practice torture but only unfortunate that such incidences rarely come in the open for the rest of the world to know. It is very blasphemous for people to demonize torture yet in essence; torture has been successful used to retrieve vital information that has been used to save millions of people all over the world.
In conclusion, legalizing the use of torture is a step forward towards making people avail vital information to the concerned authorities. Opponents of torture have not provided a better method of extracting information from terrorists and it remains therefore that, torture is a crucial weapon at the moment. Given the fact that that the safety of millions comes first than the safety of one single person, then there will is no harm in subject such an individual to torture so save lives of many. Making it aware that criminals and people who may opt to keep important information regarding the safety of millions of people will be subjected to torture will make this world a safer place. This is because nobody will be willing to encounter effects of torture, and as a result, people will voluntarily offer vital information without the lashing of a single cane.
Works Cited
Carlson, Eric. “The Pear Tree: is Torture Ever Justified”. New York: Academic Books, 2006. Print.
Darius, Richard. “Torture and Democracy”. Princeton University Press, 2009
Greenberg, J. Karen “Torture Debate in America”, London: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.
Head, Tom. “Is Torture Ever Justified”. New York: Greenhaven Press, 2005. Print.
Landay, Jonathan. “Issues in Terrorism and Homeland Security”: Selections from CQ, CQ Researcher
Lang, Anthony. “War, Torture and Terrorism” London: Oxford University Press, 2009
Popkin, Michael. “Caring for the Victims of Torture”. New York: Pitman Books.
Sandel, Michael “Justice: What Is The Right Thing To Do?” New York:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009
Wisnewski, Jeremy. “Understanding Torture”. New York: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Print