2. Is it realistic to believe that there may come a point in the future where we stop using water boarding?
3. Why do we continue to use water boarding if it doesn't even always give us reliable information?
This
article was definitely an intriguing read. One man’s quest to experiment with
water boarding under safe conditions was an interesting thought, and had me
glued from the start. The entire way he described the process was vivid: I felt
as though I was there, being water boarded myself. The scariest part of it all
was thinking about how often that process has been used to torture people, and
if I dare say it, it’s lack of efficiency. People will tell you anything you
want to hear if you’re torturing them. There has to be a more reliable way of
getting information out of people. I know it’s unrealistic, but the optimist in
me believes that there has to be a more positive way of getting people to talk.
Why continue violence and hatred? All of it just really makes me sick.
What
freaked me out even more about this whole idea is that the United States is
most likely hiding a plethora of other torture techniques from the general public,
because they know we won’t approve of them. We are all human beings: how can we
inflict this kind of damage on one another?
Something I found poignant in the
article is when the author states that waterboarding isn’t a simulation of
drowning; it actually is drowning, but in a controlled environment. That was
such a frightening image to me: the fact that someone could so easily play
around with the air that you are able to breathe. Air is something that we take
for granted since day one; how can someone take that away from us? Drowning has
always been a fear of mine, and if I had to choose a way to die, drowning would
definitely be the last possible option. Overall, it was an eye-opening read
that made me think further about what our nation’s government does to its
prisoners.
I agree. I thought the same thing about the efficiency of this technique. One of the biggest advocates for waterboarding was ex VP Dick Cheney. I've heard interviews with him claiming that certain intelligence would have never been discovered if it wasn't for the torture he put these people through in Guantanamo as well was the ridicule these people had to endure ( I do not know if you ever saw the pictures of inmates blinded with hoods stacked on top of each other naked ). It is all pretty twisted stuff but I think the public generally either is brainwashed into thinking that all arabic people hate americans and somehow deserve this, OR they do not know about it OR are too patriotic and self absorbed to realize that the US has justified killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians because of the 2000 we lost in 9/11. We have systematically executed dozens of CHILDREN in Pakistan in the past 6 months alone while searching for "terrorists." If anything, we are encouraging a terrorist pipeline as we kill these people's innocent family members.
ReplyDeleteI think Hitchens was kind of confused on this one too to an extent because he mentions waterboarding as torture but then later calls it torture "foreplay." He seems to think of it as humane but also thinks of it as less gruesome than "the rack" for instance. Either way, I love Hitchens.