Response to Believe Me, It's Torture

1. Does "waterboarding" classify as torture?
2. Do torture techniques like waterboarding actually get useful information?
3. Are we training our people for something or to resist it?

Christopher Hitchens conducted a very interesting experiment where he himself was waterboarded. His experiences are very vivid which makes his arguments all the more powerful, along with the fact that he himself went through actual torture for the sake of it. He was questioning whether or not waterboarding really is a form of torture. Then he questioned if our people were being trained to resist it or to inflict it. He raises compelling arguments of how, when prisoners were faced with torture and then released that they were then training people on how to survive and resist. Which leads to the question of if these techniques are actually useful of not. Hitchens states , "I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer" (2). The part to focus on is the "any answer." When faced with pain and torture would someone admit to something they didn't do? I know that in a situation of extreme pain being inflicted for information, I would quite possibly admit to anything, even something I would never dream of doing.

My questions are kind of off topic with his arguments, but I think its an important question. As a way of getting information, are any torture techniques actually reliable? I'm sure there are many cases where people have admitted to things they didn't do. Of course I'm merely basing my views off of movies. There has to be some truth in those films right? Maybe the way that it should be conducted is not through questioning, but of asking the tortured to simply talk. There is no possible way to really know if what someone who is tortured says is actually true or not. "It is also a means of extracting junk information" (Hitchens 3). I don't exactly know what Hitchens was trying to get at, whether he advocates it or not.