Pros And Cons Of Torture Essay

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Pages: 2

Torture as two aspects toward life and in this article itg helps support both sides. treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the ban on torture or any cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is absolute, even in times of war. Defenders of this blanket prohibition offer arguments that range from the moral (torture degrades and corrupts the society that allows it) to the practical (people will say anything under torture so the information they provide is unreliable anyway). In a BBC survey of 27,000 people in 25 countries last October, more than one out of three people in nine of those countries, including America, considered a degree of torture acceptable if it saved lives. Another poll in 2005 by the Pew …show more content…
True, America had ratified (in 1988) the Convention against Torture, but that applied only to acts carried out on American soil, they said. And though America's own 1994 federal statute against torture did cover acts by Americans abroad, this applied only to full-blown torture, not lesser abuses. In the notorious "torture memos" drawn up by the Department of Justice and the Pentagon in 2002 and 2003, the same lawyers sought to restrict the normal definition of torture "severe pain or suffering" to extreme acts equivalent to "serious physical injury, organ failure, or even death". Not until the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan in 2006 did the administration accept that all detainees, wherever held, were protected by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which bans all forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as well as torture. Within U.S. history torture has both benefited as well as a huge constraint that has affected us greatly and will keep adding on to our