Torture Is Not Effective

Related Articles:

Fox News

It has long been debated whether or not torture actually gets any valuable information out of a person. The majority of psychologists say that it does not because the person will say anything to get you to stop the pain or panic, whatever one is trying to induce. Now we have an example to back this up. Apparently, one Al Qaeda prisoner was waterboarded 183 times. Let me ask this question, if you have to do an interrogation process 183 times on someone, is it really effective? Even after a few times the guy probably figured out a way to fool the system by acting like he was closer to passing out than he really was, or purposely passing out to stop it.

The United Nations has defined waterboarding as torture and the United States prosecuted top Japanese personnel after World War II for waterboarding some of our people. We should apply the same methodology to our own people who were in charge of this. I know some people will say "oh but they do it to our guys." You know what? Yes they do it to our people sometimes if they are captured. That is what has made us the good guys in the eyes of the world in the past. As much as some people would like to deny the fact that that matters, it does. If a lot of other major countries don't like you, they can put serious damage on your economy and make all of our lives a lot worse. Things work better when you are liked. The other bonus to having very humane treatment of prisoners of war is that soldiers from nations who are corrupt and are being forced to fight are a whole lot more likely to just surrender if they know they are going to get food, water, and shelter and not get killed.

War Ethics

Related Articles:

Al Jazeera

Let me use this first paragraph to make this topic clear. I am going to be talking about what is right or wrong during a war. This is not to debate whether or not a war was just or unjust to start in the first place. For the purposes of this post, assume any given war has already begun.

Because I have only one source, I am not going to choose sides here. A human rights group is claiming that Israel mistreated the wounded and attacked medical personnel in the recent invasions in Gaza. Israel is doing its own investigation and is claiming that fighters coming against them were posing as medical personnel or wounded people to lure them in to combat where they would have an advantage. The human rights group has requested and independent investigation and I think that is a great idea.

There are two possibilities for what has occurred here. The first is that Israel really did as the claims say. If this is true Israel is just as bad as any evil dictator and we should not be allies with them. That would be truly wrong and it should be reprimanded. If Israel's claim is true then what they did was fine. If you, as a fighter or combatant, choose to pose as medical personnel or a wounded person you take away the rights of your own medical personnel or wounded. If I am a soldier or a commander and I know this is has been going on, I am going to care about my own life or my own men's lives a lot more than my opponents. This is simply how war goes. You can't fake like you are a non-combatant, then start attacking, and expect that your opponents won't start shooting at other non-combatants.

We will need more information before we can make a decision on this. If anyone has anymore sources on this please post.