Torture: Why It Should Stop

Torture: Why It Should Stop

Torture, the most extreme form of human violence, resulting in both physical and psychological consequences. A technique of interrogation that has been proven time and time again to not only be ineffective but also a waste of time. Studies have shown that not only does torture psychologically damage the mind of the victim, but also can hurt the inflictor. If there is proof that torture is useless, why do we still use it? Torture should not be used to get information out of prisoners because of the risk of false information, enemy resistance and utter uselessness.

Tortured prisoners give false information. One writer writes “Many survivors of torture report that they would have said anything to make the torture stop.” (Mayer, 2005; McCoy, 2006) Another says that “We had people who were willing to confess to anything if we would just stop” (Andersen). The NY times reports that in 2002, A Syrian born Canadian named Maher Arar was stopped in an airport and was interrogated. He was later sent to a prison where he was beaten, tortured and questioned for the next 10 months of his life. To stop the punishment, he “admitted” to getting training in Afghanistan! A country he had never even been to. It was later discovered that everything that he confessed to was false, and was just a lie to stop the torture. Not only did you destroy someone’s life, but you also wasted taxpayer’s money! Imagine the amount of money wasted on getting planes to that area of Afghanistan where that guy was “trained” at. Or the amount of money that was used to fund this prison! Confessions made during torture are unreliable and are usually just statements to stop the torture.

Another reason why torture is not effective is because futur...

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...rrorist organization. You are innocent, and you know that you have nothing to do with this. After being brutally tortured and questioned over and over again, you might start doubting yourself. After a while you will start to “remember” doing things for this organization. Your brain will treat these false memories and actual memories, and before you know it, you’re telling your captor that you are a hardened terrorist, who hates liberty and justice! As one doctor puts it “Cortisol-induced damage to the prefrontal cortex can cause confabulation, or false memories. Because a person being tortured loses the ability to distinguish between true and false memories, as a 2008 study showed, further pain and stress does not cause him to tell the truth, but to retreat further into a fog where he cannot tell true from false” (“Neuroscience: Torture Doesn’t work and Here’s Why”)