Torture
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Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons including punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties.
Captured Viet Cong soldier, blindfolded and tied in a stress position by American forces during the Vietnam War, 1967
While solitary confinement, life imprisonment without the prospect of parole, and corporal punishment have been challenged, imprisonment itself escapes scrutiny despite evidence it is harmful.
Two Elamite chiefs flayed alive after the Battle of Ulai, Assyrian relief
"The custody of a criminal does not require torture" by Francisco Goya, c. 1812
Waterboarding
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Waterboarding or controlled drowning is a form of torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the person to experience the
Torture
…the prohibition of torture, but on the other hand can be used to justify tortuous practices (for example, the United States government argued that waterboarding is not torture). Depending on the definition used, torture may be distinguished from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment (CIDT) by the severity or…
Two United States soldiers and one South Vietnamese soldier waterboard a captured North Vietnamese prisoner of war near Da Nang. Published on the front cover of The Washington Post on 21 January 1968.
Demonstration of waterboarding at a street protest during a visit by Condoleezza Rice to Iceland, May 2008
The Water Torture—Facsimile of a woodcut in J. Damhoudère's Praxis Rerum Criminalium, Antwerp, 1556
Torture of the English by the Dutch according to the English account