...Director Mike Hayden responded to then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump publicly pledging to use torture against terrorism suspects, including the infamous tactic of waterboarding. Hayden is a strong advocate for the CIA’s post-9/11 program of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a variety of torture tactics, including waterboarding. However, since the CIA officers and contractors employed these techniques, executive order and law now ban their use. Does Hayden’s remark signify a long-term change in CIA attitude towards coercive interrogation techniques, or is it indicative of another lull before parts of the Agency revive the practice?...
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...Deception by the Investigating Officer NAME AJS/532 August 5, 2013 Margery Melvin Deception by the Investigating Officer There are three sides to every story: the suspect’s version, the police’s version, and somewhere in the middle lies the truth. Humans by nature will instinctively do anything to ensure the security of his or her survival. Regardless if an individual is guilty or not the possibility of meeting consequences for his or her actions will almost always sway the individual to deny said actions to prevent the consequences from happening. Law enforcement personnel walk a fine line with regard to the use of deception, to find the truth. This paper will analyze the code of ethics in comparison to law enforcement procedure, and the role of nonverbal communication play with regard to detecting deception. The Ethics of Deception Ethical and moral behaviors are characteristics that individuals have but not all individuals have the same degree of moral ground. Everyone has the right to free choice and free-thinking, which are the foundation of the pursuit of happiness, life, and liberty. Within the context of free choice, humans have the choice of telling the truth or lying. Truth is usually only given freely when the foreseen benefit exists; otherwise most individuals will resort to a lie. By nature, humans do not want to experience pain, harm, or anything that may restrict individual freedoms. For individuals who violate laws, social norms, or otherwise...
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...1b) Discuss the problems of conducting research into the detection of lies (15) When conducting research into detecting lies, researchers could potentially face many problems. These could be ethical or practical. The study by Mann attempted to find out about the police’s ability to detect liars. They studied this as we cannot know for sure if the police are good at identifying liars as the public are not allowed to observe recordings of interviews as a suspect is always innocent until proven guilty. The aim of this research was to test police officers ability to distinguish truth and lies during interviews with suspects. Her research was made up of 99 police officers from Kent. This alone is a practical problem as it means the sample is geographically limited to only one area and means the sample can only be representative of this area or other police forces. Perhaps the MET or the FBI have different methods of detecting lies and are either better or worse than much larger forces. A problem in conducting research with this sample was that there wasn’t a control group of non-police officers to test the hypothesis of this study; therefore it was not proved that police officers were better at detecting lies. This research was a field experiment meaning that the ethical guidelines may be challenged as Mann would have had to have gained the full permission of the participants before conducting the study. In this study, Police officers were shown 54 video clips of 14 suspects of...
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...Innocence is surpassed by confessions. Many are times when the confessions are false. False confessions are made to incriminate a suspect of a crime and have them convicted of the crime that they did not commit. False confessions are made when the mode of interrogation is aimed to put the suspect under pressure, where the police subject the suspect to long hours of interrogation with no rest, interrogation in the absence of an attorney, race difference in the interrogation room and perception of torture during interrogation. This was the case in the interrogation of Amanda Knox. The aim of this paper is to determine why innocence is surpassed by confessions. False confessions have been used to convict innocent victims over the years all over...
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...Terrorism of Ultimate Torture In every war against terrorism, information is a key weapon. But does that mean that torture can be used as an acceptable technique to extract information? According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, torture is considered as the ultimate violation of human being's individual rights and is the only crime that every state must punish. The Abu Ghraib torture and prison abuse case suffers the utmost unbearable torture implemented by the U.S military army on the innocent prisoners. The case also demonstrates the impact of the unfair use of power over the prisoners as the military uses restricted techniques of torture to humiliate the prisoners and gather information. In the summer of 2003, the Abu Ghraib case came to public attention shortly after the U.S military army committed human rights violations against the prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib Prison. They used unethical methods of physically and mentally torturing the prisoners as part of their interrogation techniques. Some of the harsher interrogation techniques forced upon the prisoners were engaging in sexual and homosexual behaviours and using opaque bags to cover their faces. The increasing pressure forced upon the U.S military army to determine the cause of the mortar attacks on the U.S eventually, led to many military personnel applying harsher interrogation techniques to procure more information from the prisoners. To protect the Americans from terrorism, the U.S started to control...
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..."This guy was in interrogation. He wasn't willingly giving stuff up." That’s what an officer involved in the capture of Saddam Hussein told the Washington Post. If the informant who led U.S. forces to Saddam wasn't giving information willingly, why did he give any information at all? It is hard to avoid thinking about the dirty word that everyone is too polite to mention, the "T-word": torture? They say it was just "interrogation," which is what torture lite is. Things like bags over the head, tight handcuffs, no light, no food or bathroom, endless shouting or blaring music or noise, bits of light violence. And, of course, the constant mental and emotional torture of fearing that serious physical pain might start taking place at any moment. But, is it morally correct to use these techniques on an individual just for the sole purpose of obtaining information? The following paper will go in-depth on the moral standpoints of torture lite. From an Act Utilitarian viewpoint, torture lite can indeed be justified. I would say that an individual act of torture lite is justified when it will clearly produce more good than harm. Weigh the suffering of the victim against the odds of either deterring great amounts of crime or obtaining information vital to avoid large amounts of suffering for the greater good. Basically, this act can surely benefit a society just by placing a little bit of suffering on someone to better the society as a whole. This is how torture lite can be justified...
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...Torturing Terrorist The word torture makes teeth cringe with images of a person tied down to a chair with ruptured lips, bruised face, in a room full of people taking turns in “beating the truth” out of them. Torturers have an illusion of finding the “truth” through creative forms of inflicting agonizing pain on a terrorist. During times of crisis this technique can be tempting to practice. The ticking time bomb scenario is always a form in an attempt to justify torture (Smith). These methods can cause a negative impact in communities in our nation. Torture should not be an option. Torture is defined as: the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty (Dictionary.com). In human nature every being is wired to survive. The primal instinct takes over a person when they are being tortured and know that they are in a life or death situation. Regardless if they know anything about what the interrogators want to know, they will say anything to keep themselves from being tortured. Excruciating pain is not the only way of obtaining information because torture has two forms that could be either physical or psychological (law.harvard.edu). There have been data-based attempts to probe the definition of torture. In a sophisticated empirical study of 432 torture survivors, Metin Basoglu (2009) analyzed the psychological meaning of 46 torture techniques. Statistical analyses revealed...
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...My Whether torture should be allowed in situations such as interrogation and other areas of security, is a debatable topic. Christians must provide strong biblical references, instead of our emotions, or it can cause us to get drawn into a political confrontation and lose witness with someone. An utilitarianism would probably search the specific issue of torture out to see if it fit their description of “Good and/or Right”. If this torture of one person or a small group were to benefit thousands of others by saving their lives and protecting their personal security, utilitarianism would say that it is good to do this because it is at the benefit of the more, and is right to do so in turn. Kant’s Duty based ethics would look at this situation and ask if the person performing the torture was fulfilling duty by doing so. If this person were following the instructions by the higher command, it doesn’t matter how this person feels, the duty is being fulfilled and that is a good and/or right thing. Virtue ethics have a seemingly similar approach, but focus more on the emotions and feelings the person has other that the motives. This person that is torturing out of duty is fulfilling that duty nonetheless, but this person might enjoy torture for his own personal gain. Even though the duty is being fulfilled, virtue ethics say that this person is wrong in doing it, not by fulfilling the duty, but by other selfish motives. If this person were doing it out of love of country in order...
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...survive .Eventhough he had only small amount of food everyday ,he was so grateful that he still alive in this world and still want to fight for his life .The second theme is where , we must control our mind and do not let our mind control ourself .This means that , in our life , we have to think thoroughly before doing something for ourself and we have to set our own mind not to only live in comfort zone .Like what have Mason mentioned in the story ‘Well, deprived is largely and attitude of mind.’(Page 53 Paragraph 3).The third is the importance of respecting other , eventhough our enemy.As what we can take example , is when Mason respected his interrogator , Masahiro .Everyday at the same time ,Masahiro will come to Mason’s room for interrogation .From what we all used to hear ,interrogator usually will not respect the suspect but it was...
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...Kenny Anderson Political Science Prof. Hawn 10 October 2012 Government and Torture Means of torture have been used around the world for a number of years. At one point in time it had been terminated in the United States; however, after the events of September 11, 2001, it has come back as an acceptable way to acquire information from terrorists. Torture is, according to the United Nation Convention Against Torture in 1984: “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to, lawful sanctions.” (OHCHR) This definition, regardless of any country's own rules, regulations and laws is obligatory to be carried out by all the countries. When someone is accused of being a culprit of torture, there are various credentials, which are modified to wartime situations when needed. In general to be a culprit, one must bring severe physical, mental pain or suffering upon the victim. In most scenarios...
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...Understanding the World after 9-11 Even though we still have Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp there are those who feel that we should close it down and stop the torture for example degrading the person lack of sleep or lack of food and even though it was effective at times to get information out of prisoners by using such techniques though after September 11, 2001 and the media getting pictures of how we was treating these prisoners we had to change, some to the good others are not so good because a prisoner may tell you what you want to hear and it may not be the truth. Then there is still the public inquiring about the prisoners where would we have to transfer them? This scares those who live near a prison, many are terrorist so what should we do? Clean up and make Alcatraz Island also known as the Rock and put them there? From what we have learned that place is no better. Until there is peace throughout all the lands and countries there will and must be safeguards not just for us but for those who are suicide bombers and other terrorist. When someone threatened U.S. interests and safety, the government started thinking up ways to protect the citizens of our beautiful country. This is where the USA Patriot Act came from. The USA Patriot Act was signed into law by former President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001, just a little over a month after the attacks. It is an acronym that stands for, Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required...
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...chose confession through coerced internalization. Experts explain that these types of confessions occur when individuals truly believe they are guilty despite the evidence to the contrary. (Chapman 2013) The psychological research has found that some of these false confession happen during interrogation when the interrogator believes the suspect is guilty and they employ whatever means possible to get that confession. So not only will the suspect confess they will form false memories of the crime. (Chapman 2013)The regular american not studying Forensic psychology or criminal justice may assume that an innocent person would only confess if they were beaten or tortured; however there is evidence in our criminal justice system that techniques far less coercive than torture have produced verifiably false confessions in a surprising number of cases. (Contanzo, Krauss 2013) Through the readings for this discussion I have discovered, and while I do not believe it would be fair to say that all investigators use coercion to get confessions, many police interrogation techniques used are designed to elicit a confession and overcome any denial even if the person is innocent. The police interrogation is a psychological process where the police uses three components isolation- to induce anxiety in the suspect therefore making them more likely to confess confrontation-the interrogator accuses the suspect and can use real or fictitious evidence minimization- the interrogator will show sympathy...
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...Question such as “Is torture ever justified in effort to prevent massive harm or the lost of lives?” For me, I do think that torture is justified. I clearly know that torturing is not good and it violate human rights and human dignity. However, I still think torture give a lot of benefit to leaders during their time in need. The reason why I think torture is justified is because torturing people do sometimes bring out good result during the interrogation. Not only do I believe in torture is needed in some situation, but the study also proof that torture bring out positive outcome such as prevent death and suffering on massive scare. Base on the I’ve heard from some people, especially those who’ve been in war that Even when their soldier caught...
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...boarding and genetic engineering. Is water boarding a form of torture or not? Both sides bring a valid argument to the table. Is genetic engineering socially acceptable or not? Is it a form of acceptance in this new age society? I think that water boarding is ethical and is a successful way of getting a subject to come forth with information withheld, whereas genetic engineering is something which is unethical and immoral. Water boarding is a method used to extract information and is sometimes also referred to as a “torture method”. This approach has been under scrutiny since its introduction in the late 14th century. The method, originally called “water torture” or “water cure”. At that time period it was a way of water induced confession. Today, the methods have changed slightly but the objective is still the same. In today's military, our special forces use this tactic in their SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape) training to prepare for any unorthodox treatment they would receive from enemy forces not complying with the Geneva Convention. The CIA also has used this and is currently using this as a form of interrogation of high valued targets in the Al Qaeda regime and other terrorist organizations. Since the beginning of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, this technique has been under scrutiny on whether it is ethical or moral to “torture” people. Christopher Hitchens wrote a short essay called Believe Me Its Torture. In the story he relates to the special forces community...
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...Solomon Honors English II May 9, 2014 Torture Used an Interrogation Strategy One of the most controversially talked about topics is should torture be used. Torture is one of the most extreme forms of human violence (Gernity). Torture dates back to 530 A.D, when Roman jurists espoused to virtues of torture as the highest form of truth (Green). Torture was a well-established American tradition (Gewen). Torture can be used to gain valuable information in a timely manner, and other countries at war will not hesitate to use torture against their enemies to gain information. American Police and the U.S. Military have tortured people to gain information and evidence even though it is technically illegal. This shows that America is willing to break laws to gain information. Cruel and unusual punishment is banned in many countries including the United States of America (Torture is a Just Means for Preventing Terrorism). The Geneva Conventions ban the use of violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture (Torture is a Just Means for Preventing Terrorism). The United Convention Against Torture bans torture of all civilians, combatants, prisoners of war and terrorists (Torture is a Just Means for Preventing Terrorism). The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 5 states,” No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Torture is a Just Means for Preventing Terrorism)...
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