Our President-elect and Vice-President-elect are quite the pair. They are both in favor of torture. Back in April, President-elect Donald Trump said that he is in favor of torture and he has even mentioned going after terrorists’ families.
Our Vice-President-elect, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, won’t rule out torture. He danced around the answer in reaction to Senator John McCain coming out against torture.
Pence said:
“… What I can tell you is that going forward, as he outlined in that famous speech in Ohio, is that a President Donald Trump is going to focus on confronting and defeating radical Islamic terrorism as a threat to this country.’’
Here is a video with Mike Pence talking about the issue:
Will Trump allow waterboarding? "We're going to have a president who will never say what we'll never do," says Gov. Mike Pence. pic.twitter.com/GuFaQPXM8q
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) November 20, 2016
Trump once said:
“Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would — in a heartbeat. And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.”
“Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing. It works.”
This is totally scary. We don’t need to resort to these horrific practices to fight our enemies. If we torture our prisoners of war, then our enemies may torture their prisoners.
Does Torture Work?
Not only are Trump and Pence’s words scary, but torture doesn’t always work. It is actually hard to get information that way. Also, the information you get may or may not be reliable.
If you hurt someone enough, they will say anything to make it stop. Also, people can be trained to resist torture. If that is the case, the person may never say anything. It is hard to predict how someone will react when they are actually in that situation. Survival instincts will kick in at some point.
Here is John Oliver’s take on the issue:
Featured image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
