Torture and Rendition
In public testimony, CIA officials have described individuals being subjected to harsh interrogation and imprisonment methods, although there has been much arguing about when those methods constitute torture. There have been allegations and substantial evidence the CIA uses black sites in other countries, to avoid US law about harsh interrogation on US territory.
A claim that the black sites existed was made by The Washington Post in November 2005 and before by human rights NGOs. US President George W. Bush acknowledged the existence of secret prisons operated by the CIA during a speech on September 6, 2006.
There are US officials (e.g., John Yoo) and scholars (e.g., Alan Dershowitz) who argue that torture may be justifiable.
Read more about this topic: CIA Transnational Human Rights Actions
Famous quotes containing the words torture and and/or torture:
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Imagine that it is you yourself who are erecting the edifice of human destiny with the aim of making men happy in the end, of giving them peace and contentment at last, but that to do that it is absolutely necessary, and indeed quite inevitable, to torture to death only one tiny creature, the little girl who beat her breast with her little fist, and to found the edifice on her unavenged tears—would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”
—Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)