First Class Fitness

Princeton University Press

They had announced, but Bush has vetoed the law adopted by the U.S. Congress, banning simulated asphyxiation (throw water on the head of a detainee to cause a sensation of drowning) and other hard interrogation on suspicion of terrorism, is very bad news. The simulated asphyxiation is considered by Rigth Human Watch, Amnesty International and other human rights organizations as torture without palliatives. A torture used by the CIA. President Bush advisers recommended veto the law since it began to be discussed at the Congress, because they considered it incompatible with obtaining information in the fight against terrorism. Bush, which is not characterized by their intellectual depth, has had the nerve to say that the practice of this torture has helped to save lives. And he dared to affirm that the simulated choking is not a torture.

President Bush’s veto will be one of the most shameful acts of his presidency, said Senator Edward Kennedy, and it that the use of torture is not only illegal but that its results are unreliable and harms legitimate efforts to get information, because it induces the person questioned tell what the torturer wants to hear. The trial of Senator Kennedy match of a researcher in the study of its history, Darius Rejali, Professor at the Faculty of Reeds (Portland), who just publish Torture & Democracy at Princeton University Press, where diving in the recent history of torture and torture. Rejali stated that if you search a false confession or that the victim is submissive, torture is useful, but if you search for the truth, torture is the most sloppy method that exists. Darius Rejali has dismantled a myth of the use of torture: victims speak. To demonstrate its falsity provides an enlightening historical fact, fruit of his rigorous research: between 1500 and 1750, French legally tortured 785 people, but only spoke 23.