Believe Me, It’s Torture

Does water boarding conflict with our laws regarding human rights or are they ignored when used on foreign citizens ?

Is water boarding an effective tool to receive information that would safe guard the U.S and its allies from any outside attacks?

If water boarding is ok to use on the use on the enemy what stops the U.S gov't from using it on its own citizens?

          In the article "Believe Me, It’s Torture" by Christopher Hitchens and issue that has grown very popular all across America is the torture  technique call "water boarding". Water boarding from what I have been told is an act in which a towel is placed on your face while buckets of water are being poured on your head, cause the impression of drowning. There are several debates on whether this practice produces any results or is it conflict with are laws about human rights? In my opinion I believe that water boarding should be outlawed, it’s a very brutal way of extracting information from key individuals and it infringes on our human rights.

     What I've been noticing a lot in Mr.Hitchens article is the relation of terrorist and water boarding, he seems to relate them quite often. I find that due to the up rise of extreme individuals such as these terrorist, extreme measures seem to come out from the U.S to combat this. I find this very interesting because water boarding began as a training scenario to toughen up our special forces but now it being implemented for counter insurgence and intelligence.

            I wanted to also touch up on the point of if water boarding is really producing information that could protect this nation from further harm. As Hitchens sates, Water boarding make participants blurting out useless and sometimes misleading info, it’s not like a technique produces accurate result that other forms like bribery, surveillance and wire tapping.

A very important issue I have with water boarding is that if the gov’t is able to do this to people they want information from what’s stopping them form water boarding U.S citizens? Water boarding is a very serious and brutal torture method and it not only threatens our reputation of a freedom loving country but it could cause a evolution of how information is extracted no matter who is being interrogated.

This is Mr.Hitchens torture experiment on video that he posted, notice the impact of water boarding in just the few seconds he started.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efh_6_-tHgY