Essay: Torture through the ages and modern day use

Since there has been information, there has been people that have been trying to hide it from people. And since there has been people hiding information, someone has wanted to know this information. The most common way that people have wanted to find out this intelligence is torture. Torture doesn’t necessarily have to be just to gain knowledge, it can be for prisoners, criminals, or just people people want to die slowly. Torture has been around for thousands of years. Some people may think going to school, waiting in line to go the bathroom or writing a 1,000 word essay is torture, but I guarantee you have not been strapped to the ground and forced to lay down while bamboo stalks grow through your body. The likelihood of this to happen to someone is very slim, but it has happened throughout history. There has been many different ways that people have tried to inflict pain on one another, even in modern times. Today torture has caused public terror with organizations like ISIS broadcasting worldwide and posting videos online of their heinous acts on other human beings.
There are many different ways to torture someone along with different objectives. Sometimes you might just want to hurt the person getting tortured. A common thing to do was damage the limbs of a person. One way they would do that is crush the knuckles of a person. A person would do this by placing another person’s hand in a vise-grip-like device with studs and they would think tighten the vise until the the fingers of the victim are broken or dislocated. Another way they would just harm the extremities would be by dislocating their shoulders. All they did was sit an individual in a chair, put something in front of them so they would nit move forward and then tie a string to the persons hand and pull forward until the shoulder was out of its socket. Those may sound pretty awful but compared to other forms of torture these seem minor.
Unfortunately, more often than not, it would end in some losing their life. There are so many ways that different ways that this was perform this. Each different culture had their own way of doing this. The Romans had an especially excruciatingly painful to torture and kill people. They had completely hollow metal sculptures of bulls that had a door to them and they were large enough to hold one or more people inside of them. They would set the “bulls” over a fire so that the metal would get hot. The Romans would then put the people inside of the sculpture. The part I find as the most clever is the fact that they made two holes where the Bulls nostrils would be, the hole would let out steam and the sound of screams so it would sound like a bull. In the Middle Ages, torture was an extremely popular way to execute victims. One way of execution involved using a rat, a cage, and heat. A person (usually a prisoner or someone who committed a crime) was strapped to a table/bed so they were not able to move. They would then place a cage on top of the person’s stomach. However, the cage did not have a bottom to it so the rat was on the victim’s bare skin. They would then out something hot on top of the cage, usually coals or embers from a fire. That would eventually create an immense amount of heat on the inside of the cage for the rat, the rat would then do whatever it took to get away from the heat, eventually leading to the animal burrowing into the skin of the victim. The rat would then rip and tear through the person’s vital organs ending his or her’s life in a long and painful process. It may seem like torturing people is only something that happened hundreds of even thousands of years ago, but that is not true. The act of torture even goes on in the United States.
The United States may not be the first country that comes to mind when you bring up torture, but they definitely do utilize it. Before May 2, 2011, the United States was looking for well known terrorist Osama Bin Laden. It took years and years to track him down and train for the mission. But before we started training and planning, we had to gain intelligence by capturing and interrogating people involved in al-Qaeda. As you could probably imagine, they were not exactly eager to just tell the US all the information they wanted, it took some convincing. The most common way that the United States did this was by torture, but not just any form of torture, water-boarding. Water-boarding was so effective because it would simulate drowning extremely realistically and it was a simple process. All that a person would need to perform it is a wash cloth or rag and water. They would just lay the person down on a table or even the ground and hold down their arms and legs and place the rages on the victims face then begin pouring water on the rag. The rag would leak water through it not allowing the person to breathe, and it would get heavier because it was saturated by the water. It would simulate drowning because of the fact you cannot move your arms and legs to help you. Also, the water travels down the nose of the victim causing his or her gag reflex to react which often happens while drowning. It is not unusual for a person to be harmed more severely by themselves during this. When the person reacts and struggles, it could result in broken bones because of the restraints and how hard they are pulling on them. It is also not always physical injuries that are the worst. It taxes the person’s mind so much during this because of the fact that they are experiencing such an intense sensation and they think they’re dying. Even though it’s an extremely effective way to get information, it has been illegal for the last nine years in the US. It has been argued that it should be allowed, but, as a global powerhouse, the United States did not want to be considered a country that utilizes torture.