Is Torture Ever Justified

Is torture ever necessary? Is it ever considered justified?

Torture: the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.

Ooh. Tough topic. Here we go

Well, to start off I am just going to throw out my initial, gut feeling, and that is that no, torture cannot be justified. I suppose we will have to look at some scenarios to more completely examine the topic. First off, we will look at different levels of torture.

I will begin with less severe forms of torture. Chinese water torture seems to me to be not terribly severe. Now, before all you who may have experienced it tear my head off, let me qualify the statement. I have never undergone Chinese water torture. I am not very qualified to comment on it. However, I am doing the best I can. This type of torture is purely psychological, as I understand it. It seems that the way it works is that hearing that drop so consistently and over long periods of time just drives you nuts. However, I do not believe that the affects are in any way permanent, and there are several ways we experience it in daily life. For one, every morning, my alarm rings in the exact same way at the exact same time. And every morning, I wake in very nearly a murderous rage. I really need to change that ringtone. A child, when trying to get something from its mother will often say "mommy!" at the exact same pitch over and over and over...and over...and over again until the mother can not take it anymore and caves. Also, back to my own experience, on Saturdays, one of only two days a week when my alarm does NOT go off, I like to sleep until a ways into the afternoon. However, the doors in my dorm are quite loud when they are allowed to close by themselves, and the soundproofing in the building is a joke. Thus, every Saturday morning, the JERK down the hall goes in and out of his room over...and over...and over again. Needless to say, I feel like strangling him, throwing him off the roof, running him over with a car, and burning whatever is left.
These three examples seem to be similar to water torture, particularly the example of the child, and yet we do not try that child for psychological abuse, and the mother is not scarred for life. However, these are very light examples. To couple the water aspect with sleep deprivation and other such things can leave lasting psychological damage. So now it falls to us to examine the needs of a given situation. If the knowledge that we know someone ahs will immediately deliver thousands of people from certain and gruesome death, and the only way to get the information is by severe torture, such as waterboarding or the extreme version of Chinese water torture, then you may have an argument. However, I still can not condone such extreme methods. I would gladly beat the stuffing out of the man with my own two fists for being such a (Insert many nasty things). I could not permanently damage the man's psyche. But would he not deserve it, you may ask? I am sure that he would deserve it, yet I am not so prideful as to take it upon myself to render that judgment on him. I believe that whatever horror I inflicted on him would echo in my own soul, and in a way, damage me even more than I would be damaging him. To take it upon oneself to make the judgment of how much one human life, one soul, is worth when measured against other lives and souls is folly. In order to do so would be to quantify the soul, which I defy you to do. Assuming that it is possible to quantify the soul (Which I have to say it is not), and rejecting the case of divine revelation, to quantify the soul would require immense experience, knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge and experience aside, wisdom is the very thing that tells you not to try it.
         So ignoring the numerous minor tortures that people subject themselves and others to on a daily basis, and taking only the case of waterboarding and extreme water torture, I am going to stand by my original gut feeling. Under no circumstances is psychologically damaging or physically disfiguring torture justified. Furthermore, it is not necessary. Pain is not the only thing that can get someone to talk, there are any number of things that one can appeal to in another human being. Pain is simply the easiest. In the movie Body of Lies, Leonardo DiCaprio is a US intelligence agent in the middle east. He is stationed in Jordan, where he begins working with the Jordanian Head of Intelligence, Hani, the equivalent of the US CIA. In one scene, Hani shows DiCaprio the elegance with which he runs his operations. He captures a young man from an insurgent safe house. This is a young man that Hani has known since the man was a teenager. The man has not talked to his mother in a long time, and is currently running missions with terrorist insurgents. Hani hands the man a cell phone, and turns toward DiCaprio. He says that on the phone is the man's mother. She will say that she loves the gift and the note he sent her, and she is very happy to hear that he is shaping up to be a good young man, and has stopped running around with terrorists. She will say that she is proud of him and she loves him.
          The gifts and the note are not from the man. They are from Hani. After the man hangs up the phone, Hani turns to him and says that if he does not cooperate, his mother will learn the truth about him. You never see nor hear from the man again until the end of the movie, when it turns out that he is the one who gives up the information that leads to capturing the terrorist leader, and saving DiCaprio's life. This is in stark contrast to the less elegant, often brutal methods that DiCaprio's boss has him use most often, and in the end, it is far more effective. Hani did not appeal to the man's fear of pain, nor any of the baser, animal instincts in human nature. Hani appealed to the man's love for his mother. Love, not pain.