Torture!...or is it?

An editorial piece in the New York Times discusses how the Bush administration has dishonored the history and squandered the respect of America that we have taken so long to gain and worked so hard to get by creating secret prisons where people are held without charges, tortured, and killed. After September eleventh, President Bush allowed for an extralegal detention camp, specifically the one at Guantanamo Bay, where the Central Intelligence Agency operatives could extract information from prisoners who were captured and held in secret. Except, we are now using techniques that are tortuous and embarrassing towards our country.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declared that these tortuous acts did not violate the standard of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” This allowed the White House to keep on torturing the victims.

What is truly unbelievable about this is the fact that it is the United States that is now the creator of such a disgusting prison. A country where justice, habeas corpus, and equality are all raised with dignity and pride. The United States helped with the collapse of communism, but now we are imitating some of the negative attributes we condoned in the past.

It is unfortunate that we are using torture to try and obtain truth from these prisoners because experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions. Also, it is very possible that many of these prisoners are not actually guilty, but they do not have a fair chance to try and become free. We need to give these prisoners their rights, especially if we plan to have other countries follow our actions.