Why I believe torture should be illegal, why Washington needs to sort out this mess, and why the general public needs to be made aware of the awful crimes committed by the Bush administration. Human rights violations cannot be ignored. Picture this: A boy is born in Iran. In the night he is kidnapped and forcibly taken away from his mother by the Hamas. The moment he is taken from his mother he is treated like cattle by the terrorist organization that kidnapped him. He grows up and learns to live his life in fear, knowing that what he is being forced to do is wrong, but he must do it in order to fulfill his desire to live (a psychological and evolutionary force that causes humans to fight for survival, even when it may not seem logical to continue living.) At the ripe young age of seven a gun is placed in his hands. He lives in the shadows. At infantry drill he tries his best not to be his best. He tries not to hit bull’s-eye on the target, in worry of being drafted to kill. He goes to bed thirsty and near starving every night. Upon waking every day in his soot filled bed, he makes a promise to himself that he will commit suicide before he is forced to hurt another person. He doesnt dare run away in fear of being killed if found, or worse, left to starve and dehydrate in the remote desert where his base resides. In 2003 his base is raided by the United States military. The head administrator of his base is taken. The man feels a sigh of relief until he hears from his friend that his former bunk mates are being imprisoned. Being imprisoned doesnt seem that bad though, because at least then he will not be forced to fight for something he doesnt believe in. Being imprisoned means he has a meal, a bed, and a toilet if he is lucky. He sits and waits for inevitability. At the age of nineteen he sits and waits to be taken yet again, not knowing what else to do or where else to go. Having never known his real mother, and what could have been a reasonable life, he has no possessions to care for. He can only hope that prison life will relieve him from the life he once knew, the life he was innocently forced in to. The next day he is dragged out of his bed by a subordinate of the United States military. A subordinate that was being forced to break the law by senior members of the Bush administration. He is thrown in the dirt and dragged to a car that later drives to a CIA black site, a secret prison for detainees that have been accused of terrorist affiliation. Being affiliated with the Hamas, he accepts his inevitability. Upon arrival to the black site, he is thrown in a makeshift cage with three other men. The cage is humid, dark, and uncomfortable. For the next four days he is fed a smoothie like nutritional drink that tastes rotten, and water that is brown with sand. On the fifth day he is taken to a facility a mile west from the black site. It is here in which he finally understands that life will be much worse than it ever was at base. He is dragged across the sand, legs bloodied. He hears loud screams coming from the many pole barns surrounding him. His superiors tell him that he is going to be questioned about his affiliation with the Hamas. He prays this will go quick. He prays there will be no pain. He prays for a different life. He prays for a different inevitability. A man drags him into the pole barn to his left. He is sat in a chair with his hands zip-tied behind him, and his ankles chained to the chair. His superiors begin asking him questions in which he cannot answer. When he does not answer he gets welts burnt into his lower stomach with a firebrand. He begins to give misinformation in hopes that the pain will stop. He becomes sick and vomits on himself. Pissed off and disgusted, the CIA interrogators leave for their break. On break they call their superiors in Washington. They communicate their anxieties over the legality of their actions. Washington did not seem to care much about human rights. The interrogators return to the man. It takes them two weeks to get the information they need. By the end of the “interrogation”, the man is so severely mutilated that it would not even seem ethical to keep him alive. He is dragged outside, pushed up against the pole bar, and shot in the back of the head. The blood is later hosed off of the pole barn and the man’s body is buried in the desert. All records of him are burned. The only result of the man’s inevitability was misinformation and pain. I am so incredibly thankful that I grew up in a country where I don’t have to experience an inevitability so entirely painful. One can only hope that our legal system does what it can to prevent these awful acts of torture. So long as there is innocence, man should not be forced to suffer.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 02:27:20 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015