Legalizing Torture Analysis

Aysha Meeks
COM 125
Dr. Lasser
26 April 2010

The Debate on Torture: Should It Be Permissible

The act of legalizing torture has been a debate amongst people for a long time. Most people feel discomfort imagining someone being tortured, whether under any circumstance, however, there are those who feel that torture can be beneficial to the government, in the most extreme cases, seeking information. For example, after the events of 9/11, where al Qaeda terrorists hijacked commercial airplanes and used as weapons of the Pentagon and World Trade Centers, the debate on whether or not “to torture captured terrorists to prevent civilian or military casualties has taken a great urgency.” Using torture, in this kind of extreme case, is what
In this argument, Sullivan expresses how Krauthammer’s point that “unless you can prove that torture never works, it should always be retained as an option” (826). Sullivan believes that Krauthammer has used an extreme example to justify his point. He asks, “How do we tell good intelligence from bad intelligence in such torture-infested interrogation” (827). Sullivan explains that you cannot. He states, “By allowing torture for ‘slow-fuse’ detainees, you sacrifice a vital principle or for intelligence that is uniformly corrupted at best and useless at worst” (827). Sullivan concludes his arguments by summarizing, “If we legalize torture, even under constrained conditions, we will have given up a large part of the idea that is America. We will have lost the war before we have given ourselves the chance to win it”
It is hard to imagine what society would be like if torture is, in fact, legalized. Will it corrupt the morals of Americans and the freedom of people? Or will it be useful to the government in protecting the citizens of America from terrorists such as those from the aftermath of 9/11? Both sides of the argument prove to have significant points on whether or not torture should be legalized or not. A part of me wants to think that torture should be legalized, but only in the extreme scenarios such as the “ticking time bomb” however, concerns about the abuse of doing this does come up. There were no alternative solutions argued about how a situation under the ticking time bomb scenario would be used on terrorists to seek information. Other than, of course, torturing them, which proved to work with the terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I believe that if a person is responsible for murdering another person, let alone thousands of people, than that person’s life should also be taken away. After the events of 9/11 the situation with terrorists can’t be taken lightly. Something needs to happen. As a whole, I believe that I am for the permissibility of torture, but again, only when the extreme cases find it