Is the use of torture good or bad as a form of interogation? What makes something an act of toture?

Check out the article below it is about the government's posibble investigation into the interrogation techniques used by the CIA, thanks in part to the good people at the ACLU. I wanted to write a brief blog on this topic, because this is pretty interesting to me.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/24/us.terror.interrogations/index.html?iref=newssearch


The article discusses some of the acts used as interrogation, which to me do not seem to be forms of torture. Example, interrogators shot a gun off in a room next to the room in which they conducted an interrogation, telling the suspect that the victim of the shot was the suspect's friend. Now, they did not actually kill said person, they simply shot the gun off, the only victim was the concrete wall. How is this torturing a person? No one was hurt, it is a technique to get the suspect to give up information, information that can be used to save lives. The article mentions how investigators said that they (the investigators) made threats, really more exaggerations, that they would find the suspect's family and bring haul them in, which again they did not do. The techniques are not hurting anyone. Torture involves bodily harm, which these techniques are not doing. There may be mental damage, but I don't know how since what they said they would do didn't happen. So to answer the second part of the title's question, no, I don't think what occured is torture.

So onto the more difficult question of good or bad/right or wrong. Our nation has never been one to utilize torture, it is something other nations do, not us. In the case of terrorism though we have a much more difficult question. Terrorists are not going to be reasonable, President Obama is not going to be able to have a nice chat with Bin Laden in the White House, terrorists are not operating under the normal rules. In spite of this, I am still not sure if it right for our government to use torture. It breaks international law and it is going to make us appear to the world as barbaric. So unfortunately, I can't decide on this topic. But, I am sure that what this cnn article discussed about the techniques is not torture, If the government wants to launch an investigation, which they probably won't find anything. It will only result in wasting millions and millions of dollars that could go to better use in helping the economy and this nation's citizens.

In closing, read the article and decide for yourself.