Should America Torture Her Prisoners?

                                                     Lee Edward Enochs
                                                      The Princeton Conservative Club

                                                     
As a busy graduate student in Princeton, New Jersey, I am finding that it is all to easy to fall into the  a form of cultural solipsism, a worldview or weltanschauung, wherein I believe that I and my immediate academic concerns are all that matter. However, in diametrical counter-distinction to this inward leaning tendency, reality conclusively demonstrates that life goes on with or without me.

With this in mind, I know that the external world and its myriad of issues exists outside of academia and as a fully engaged person, following in Socrates' maxim that "the unexamined life is not worth living," I must by necessity examine, critique and come to some resolution about the issues facing contemporary Western society.

One of the most relevant issues facing citizens living within the North American hemisphere and Western Europe pertains to the subject of torture, which by definition is the; "Infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion."

Throughout the annals of human history, individuals and governments have used torture as a method of either punishing persons for alleged crimes of offenses or as a means of extracting information from a person allegedly in possession of certain information or objective content.

Traditionally, Americans have looked down upon the use of torture as a punitive or information extracting procedure based on their apparent incongruence with Judeo-Christian principle and with seeming unethical nature of such a practice.

However, many Americans might be horrified to discover that the United States has participated in the practice of torturing prisoners to extract information. As recently as the response to the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America was involved in torturing individuals.

A couple of months ago, the US Senate released a report detailing how American operatives performed waterboarding on terrorism suspects. This report also illustrates how these suspects were tortured until their abdomens were distended. They were also deprived of sleep as long as 180 hours, hung from ceiling shackles for as long as 22 hours in a day and subjected to the inhumane practice known as "rectal feeding."

This seems utterly unconscionable to me. I cannot believe that Americans would resort to the barbaric practice of torturing people and believe this has more in common with Nazi Germany than a country that produced the noble likes of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I for one am against the practice of torture for any reason and believe that these alleged terrorist "suspects" should be tendered the same constitutional rights afforded to any person adjudicated by the US justice system. Just because these alleged terrorist suspects were captured during a time of war and are not in fact, US citizens, does not lend credibility to the argument that could be treated with such inhumanity.  I do believe the Bill of Rights' 8th Amendment to the US Constitution clearly addresses the issue of "cruel and unusual punishments."

As a Libertarian American, I have grown tired of the growing coercive power of the State and believe the practice of torture should be eliminated outright immediately and relegated to the barbaric age from whence it came.