"Waterboarding"

1.)    Should we torture captives?

2.)    Should waterboarding be allowed?

3.)    Is waterboarding a reliable tactic to get information out of captives?

 

Obviously as an American I do believe that torture is unjust, but I also do feel that there are certain occasions where there are exceptions. It’s not like Special Forces are going around and waterboarding innocent civilians as they please. They only use this tactic in special and extreme cases. These terrorists or other people that are a major threat to our country put themselves in the position to be forced for us to rely on other tactics to try and get them to confess or give us information. So I do not think it is fair for us as Americans and civilians to judge what the Special Forces do when handling dangerous people because this isn’t an ordinary situation and they are looking out for us and trying to protect us the best they can. People react differently when in extreme conditions and situations, so if they think that waterboarding is what is going to get the terrorists to cave in and confess that by all means I stand behind them.

Although, this does bring the question up of is waterboarding a reliable tactic to get information out of captives? As Hitchens says, “It may be a mean of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” He goes on to say how it gives you memory loss and people confess things that do not even pertain to what they are asking…this being said, is it worth the torture and time to rely on this form of getting people come out with the answers to the questions they are asking?