Terrorism and Torture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Terrorism and Torture - Essay Example There is an equilibrium of political, social and economic factors that are overwhelmed by recent developments in the nature of capitalism, which substantiate the contemporary use of torture as both legal and illegal means to achieving desired goals of ruling regimes. When the news of torture and abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharib Jail in Iraq came out, it became starting point of detailed discussions on the ethics of interrogating with bodily harm and mental threats. Legally questioning the inhuman treatment of suspects and the imprisoned has become an important aspect of the debate on torture. There is a long and deeply entrenched debate on the matter that whether torture is permissible under certain conditions or not. The debate is of course multidisciplinary as it draws arguments from various branches human knowledge ranging from criminology to political philosophy. The emergence of 'global risk society' in twenty first century has been the locus around which such debates on torture are popping up. The underlying spirit of the pro-torture arguments is the fact that the threats to security in twenty first century are decentred and uncertain. ... Curiously, terrorism and anti-terrorism in our times aim at the one and same thing: the destruction of the enemy more than victory over him.The widening debates over the permissibility of torture for greater common good cannot be examined by detaching from the state of affairs from which the possibility of such debates arises. Influential theorists such as Hardt and Negri (2004) have argued that the present world is characterised by a civil war of global reach. The global civil war is the primordial resistance to what they understand as the materialisation of 'Empire' in which total subsumption of life has become a reality. Thus, the resistance to the empire is a fight to save life from being conquered by the global war machine of the new transnational capitalist empire. Therefore, the fight to save life from being organised under the same logic of immaterial capitalist organization is inevitably and increasingly dealt with bodily torture and organised and directed mental harm.It is important to note that the debate on torture did not come into existence in a vacuum. It is not an attempt to answer theoretical questions, which are inspired from hypothetical models from philosophers' gambles. On the other hand, as a matter of fact, the state of affairs concretely necessitates the debate on torture for the purpose of creating an adequate policy framework to deal with the complexities of new forms of violence and crimes that increasingly spreading throughout the world. The critical question is that how the constitutional democracies could answer the challenge of respecting human rights while effectively countering and mitigating the effects of