You are in a dark room with concrete walls where no sound can enter or leave. The dim lights are flickering and there are two guards standing outside. In front of you is a man tied to a chair, he has information on a plot to kill thousands or possibly millions of innocent lives. You've asked him repeatedly to tell you what he knows, but he won’t say a word. The question arises in your mind is: should you resort to using torture?
Torture is considered the act of “inflicting physical or psychological pain” consciously and possibly injuring a living being, usually someone who is kept hostage under the torturer's control and unable to defend him or herself. As opposed to murder which is “usually” more instant, “torture” implies long periods of physical and psychological pain and suffering and where death can actually be a relief.
Although Torture seemed to have been banned “forever” after the second World War at the Geneva Convention of 1948 as going directly against the most basic of human rights, it has come back over…show more content… A US Senate Select Committee on enhanced interrogation concluded that “Torture did not result in important intelligence, and using such techniques did incalculable damage to our soft power and absolutely aided terrorist recruitment”. US organisation such as balancedpolitcs.org publish that “non-torture methods can be just as effective, if not more so. There are plenty of other methods for extracting good information that don't require physical torture. Mind control drugs, sleep deprivation, good cop-bad cop techniques, and verbal intimidation are only a few. Not only are these methods more humane, but they can also yield better information.” Some of these seem to be other forms of torture but there are clearly other methods nowadays of questioning to get information like hypnotism or lie detectors which don’t deliberately harm the person physically or
