Position Papers

Is Terrorism Justifiable?

For a period of time the US had not felt the true threat of terrorism, that is until a foundational change on September 11th, 2001. "The attack awakened the nation to the threat of Islamic terrorism at home" said Michael Franc, of the Heritage Foundation. In response to these attacks the US had developed what they called enhanced interrogation tactics, or in other words torture. Since then there has been ongoing conversation about the effects and productivity levels of these tactics. Many seem to agree that it is not an effective form of interrogation.

According to Patricia Smith in "Is Torture Ever Justified?" The spark of this debate started with Gul Rahman, "a prisoner in 2002 at a secret American detention site in Afghanistan" also know as the Salt Pit. Rahman was subject to brutal interrogation by the C.I.A. "He was striped of most of his clothes, beaten, and shackled to the wall of his cell. The next morning he was found dead of hypothermia. He was lying on the bare concrete floor with cuts and bruises on his legs, face, and torso." It raised the following questions: Was his brutal interrogation an act of torture? And was us justified, given the terrorism threat following September 11th, 2001, attacks on the U.S." On December of 2014 the 6,000 page report on the torture that took place in some of the secret American detention sites. "The report concluded that the C.I.A.'s methods were more brutal and less effective than the agency claimed. It also charged that C.I.A. officials misled the public and Congress about the information obtained through what security officials called "enhanced interrogation tactics."

This is all that is needed to draw the conclusion that using torture as a method of interrogation is ineffective and unnecessary. Subjecting people to this form of "interrogation" is unreliable in the sense that they are willing to say anything to alleviate the pain they are feeling. With that said I believe this is more than enough to prove that torture, in no way, can be justified. That doesn't even take into consideration the moral aspects of the situation.