Should the USA torture people

In November 2002, an Afghan man froze to death overnight while chained in a cell at a C.I.A. site in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, the capital. Two more prisoners died in December 2002 in American military custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

By late 2002, interrogators were recycling videotapes, preserving only two days of tapes before recording over them, one C.I.A. officer said. Finally, senior agency officials decided that written summaries of prisoners’ answers would suffice. Clandestine service officers who had overseen the interrogations began pushing hard to destroy any taping.

Some of the C.I.A.’s techniques appeared to constitute "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" under the international Convention Against Torture. The CIA now prefers that we call their interrogators who tortured prisoners in secret CIA prisons around the world as "debriefers."

Lt. Cmdr. Andrew Williams, a JAG officer with the U.S. Naval Reserve, recently resigned his commission over the alleged use of torture by the United States and the destruction of video tapes containing instances of that torture.

Waterboarding was used by the Nazi Gestapo and the feared Japanese Kempeitai. In World War II, our grandfathers had the wisdom to convict Japanese Officer Yukio Asano of waterboarding and other torture practices in 1947, giving him 15 years hard labor.

John C. Gannon, a former C.I.A. deputy director, says it was a tragic mistake for the administration to approve such methods. as waterboarding. So should our country be a country that tortures people? We report, you decide.