Terrorism and Torture

The beginning of the movie Zero Dark Thirty, there were quite a bit of gruesome torture scenes. I’ve read and heard about many methods of torturing people from history at different regions and cultures. However, it still did not prepare me for the scenes that I watched in the movie. Even animals did not deserve to be treated like that. The prisoner was deprived of food, water, and even sleep. I guess I can see what the CIA must have thought when they decided to torture people to extract information because terrorism causes a lot more harms and more civilians’ deaths are involved.

The purpose of terrorism is to destroy the morale of a nation by the random murder of innocent people. Randomness is the crucial feature of terrorist activity. This showed throughout the movie. Random shootings and bombings happened so frequently that it put people in constant fear for their live. Ordinary citizens are killed and no defense is offered. Terrorism communicates the most extreme and brutal of intentions. Essentially, it is the mass murder of the population under attack and focuses on people whose natural existence has been radically devalued. Terror is the totalitarian form of war and politics, and it shatters the war convention. It breaks across moral limits beyond which no further limitation seems possible. In other words, terrorists just kill others just because they are different politically or religiously.

            However, whether torture is a good way to extract information is another question. The type of torture that we saw in Zero Dark Thirty is called interrogational torture. Its purpose is known to the victim, which is the victim’s performance of some actions which he can perform and this performance will end the torture. I guess this was how the CIA used to justify those tortures inflicted on the prisoner.