Ethics of Torture and Preventive Detention

Ethics of Torture and Preventive Detention Discuss the ethical implications of preventive detention and interrogation tactics. Preventive detention is a pretrial detainment without the right to bail of a person accused or suspected of a crime and assumed to pose a danger to society. This type of detention can apply to political prisoners, alleged terrorists, those seeking asylum, and does not always result in a trial. Detention involves keeping people in confined conditions, often behind razor wire and electric fencing. The increase in human rights abuses, and a lack of due process occurring in immigration centers, gives authorities the power of preventive detention without trial on the basis of suspicion alone. Guantanamo Bay, for example, was once a detention center for refugees. Since September 11, 2001, it has become a detention center for suspected terrorists, some of whom have been detained without charges for years. Human rights and ethics abuses have been documented in Guantanamo Bay because of the hidden public scrutiny and lack of accountability. The human rights issue is how a terrorist is defined . In the US during the cold war, anyone who opposed the government was deemed an enemy of the state, and was legislated in the Allen Registration Act of 1940. During the 1940s and 1950s, people were executed in the US for simply refusing to name fellow communists (Doerr-Zegars, Hartmann, Lira Weinstein, 1992). Critics of this type of detention claim that just by supporting Al Qaeda or the Taliban may make a person dangerous, but it is not a mental illness. No one states that Al Qaeda members are not able to control their behavior, or are treated through psychiatric treatment. In their minds, preventive detention is an unnecessary and dangerous expansion of government power and because of this the Guantanamo Bay detainees should be charged or released. The word torture needs to be put in a context of ethics as it relates to interrogation techniques. Water boarding is an awful technique, but it is much different than mutilation with drills, rape or forcing a suspect to watch their family tortured, putting hummus in a mans anus, forcing suspects to stand on broken feet, and playing detainees songs at loud volumes on repeat. Ethical morality involves a balance of ends and means. It is pertinent to consider that there are benefits from these interrogation techniques. Critics of interrogation tactics must answer critical questions such as if by performing these activities such as water boarding, and we may be able to elicit information that would stop a massive attack on an American city, would it then be considered feasible. Or, if by doing so, we can save a thousand innocent lives? Ten thousand? What about if we knew of a possible strike on American soil and the only way to prevent such an attack was by using unethical interrogation t echniques?, would preventing such devastation be worthy of a green light to do so? The Democratic members of Congress think so. Physical torture and manipulation will successfully produce intelligence information and confessions. To some, the harsh methods of torture and interrogation lack a value that proves costly to criminal justice efforts to provide security and solve crimes. Individuals who undergo long periods of torture have been shown to exhibit considerable long-term effects of PTSD which is considered a human rights violation. Human rights law recognizes that certain rights may be suspended by governments during a time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation and the existence of which is officially proclaimed.(p.365, 2008) The ethical implications used by interrogation methods are ones that depend on the definition of ethics. If saying the ends justifies the means then ethics must have a place in the issues that surround interrogation. Ethics are defined as value, belief, principle and convictions that a group of people hold to be a noble part of life and strive to practice every day (Sheikh, MacIntyre Perera, 2008). Interrogation by itself is on no way an ethical process and the attempts to introduce ethics into interrogation methods would require that the purpose of interrogation and detention would need to be redefined. References Doerr-Zegers, O., Hartmann, L., Lira, E., Weinstein, E. (1992). Torture: Psychiatric sequelae and phenomenology. Psychiatry, 55(2), 177-184. Sands, P., Q.C., Fraser, M.,A.C.C.H. (2008). TORTURE TEAM: THE RESPONSIBILITY OF LAWYERS FOR ABUSIVE INTERROGATION/TORTURE TEAM: HUMAN RIGHTS, LAWYERS, INTERROGATIONS AND THE WAR ON TERROR A RESPONSE TO PHILIPPE SANDS. Melbourne Journal of International Law, 9(2), 365-390. Sheikh, M., MacIntyre, C. R., Perera, S. (2008). Preventive detention: The ethical ground where politics and health meet. focus on asylum seekers in australia. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 62(6), 480.

Gadgets: Social Networking Sites Essay

Nowadays, it seems like most of us students like to use gadgets for fun. It is true that those are very useful. It helps us connect to each other, to learn new things and also discover new things. We don’t think that it could have a bad influence or bad effects to us. Gadgets make our life better in many ways. It enables us to do things faster and easier. For example the cellphone, many of us are lost without it and for students this device is more than just cellphone. It is also a chat opportunity, a camera and more. A negative effect of this is that students can become obsessive and can neglect everything else like their social life and family. Computer is another one. It helps students a lot especially in assignments but social networking sites start to catch their attention like Facebook. This site has a lot of games that are so addictive like Tetris. It’s not bad to play, but the bad thing is to spend all your life in front of computer, pretending that everything else doesn’t exist. Listening to music from MP3 players can help us when doing boring or repetitive tasks. However, listening to music for long periods of time in a high volume may cause hearing problem which is extremely dangerous. Playing video games have probably influenced teenage students the most. There is a tendency that we will forget everything else and there are also chances that it might confuse us between the virtual world and real word.

Is It Possible to Travel Back in Time

Going back in time to visit an earlier era is a fantastic dream. Its a staple of SF and fantasy novels, movies, and TV shows. Who wouldnt like to go back and see the dinosaurs or watch the birth of the universe or meet their great-great grandparents? What could possibly go wrong Could someone travel to a previous era to right a wrong, make a different decision, or even completely alter the course of history? Has it happened? Is it even possible? There are a lot of questions about travel into the past, but not very many solutions. The best answer science can give us right now is: its theoretically possible. But, no one has done it.   Traveling Into the Past It turns out that people time travel all the time, but only in one direction: from the past to the present and moving into the future. Unfortunately, no one has any control over how quickly that time passes and nobody can stop time and continue to live.  It seems that time is a one-way street, always moving forward. This is all right and proper. It also fits with Einsteins theory of relativity because time only flows in one direction—forward. If time flowed the other way, people would remember the future instead of the past. That sounds very counter-intuitive. So, on the face of it, traveling into the past seems to be a violation of the laws of physics. But not so fast! It turns out that there are theoretical considerations to take into account if somebody wants to build a time machine that goes back to the past. They involve exotic gateways called wormholes, or some science fictional-sounding creation of gateways using a technology not yet available to science.   Black Holes and Wormholes NASA The idea of building a time machine, like those often depicted in science fiction films, is likely the stuff of dreams. Unlike the traveler in H.G. Wellss Time Machine, no one has figured out how to build a special carriage that goes from now to yesterday. However, astrophysics gives us one possible pathway: one could possibly harness the power of a black hole to venture through time and space. How would that work? According to general relativity, a rotating black hole could create a wormhole—a theoretical link between two points of space-time, or perhaps even two points in different universes. However, theres a problem with black holes. Theyve long been thought to be unstable and therefore un-traversable. However, recent advances in physics theory have shown that these constructs could, in fact, provide a means of traveling through time. Unfortunately, we have almost no idea what to expect by doing so. Theoretical physics is still trying to predict what would happen inside the wormhole, assuming one could even approach such a place. More to the point, theres no current engineering solution that would allow us to build a craft that would let make that trip safely. Right now, as it stands, once a ship enters the black hole, its going to get crushed by incredible gravity. The ship, and everyone aboard are made one with the singularity at the heart of the black hole. But, for the sake of argument, what if it were possible to pass through a wormhole? What would people experience? Some suggest it would probably be a lot like Alice falling through the rabbit hole. Who knows what we would find on the other side? Or in what time frame? Until someone can devise a safe way to make that trip, we arent likely to find out. Causality and Alternate Realities The idea of traveling into the past raises all sorts of paradoxical issues.  For instance, what happens if a person goes back in time and kills their parents before they can conceive their child? Lots of dramatic stories have been built around that one. Or, the idea that someone could go back and kill a dictator and change history, or save the life of a famous person. An entire episode of Star Trek was built around that idea. It turns out that the time traveler effectively creates an alternate reality or parallel universe. So, if someone did travel back and prevent someone elses birth, or murdered someone, a younger version of the victim would never come to be in that reality. And, it might or might not carry on as if nothing had changed. By going back in time, the traveler creates a new reality and would, therefore, never be able to return to the reality they once knew. (If they then tried to travel into the future from there, they would see the future of the new reality, not the one they knew before.) Consider the outcome of the movie Back to the Future. Marty McFly changes reality for his parents back when they were in high school, and that changes his own reality. He gets back home and finds his parents arent quite the same as when he left. Did he create a new alternate universe? Theoretically, he did. Wormhole Warnings! This brings us to another issue that is rarely discussed. The nature of wormholes is to take a traveler to a different point in time and space. So if someone left Earth and traveled through a wormhole, they could be transported to the other side of the universe (assuming they are even still in the same universe we currently occupy). If they wanted to travel back to Earth they would either have to travel back through the wormhole they just left (bringing them back, presumably, to the same time and place), or journey by more conventional means.   Two spaceships enter a wormhole in outer space to get to a universe in another part of the galaxy. Wormholes also are invoked in SF for time travel purposes. Corey Ford / Stocktrek Images Assuming the travelers would even be close enough to make it back to Earth in their lifetimes from wherever the wormhole spat them out, would it still be the past when they returned? Since traveling at speeds approaching that of light makes time slow down for the voyager, time would proceed very, very quickly back on Earth. So, the past would fall behind, and the future would become the past... thats the way time works flowing forward!   So, while they exited the wormhole in the past (relative to time on Earth), by being so far away its possible that they wouldnt make it back to Earth at any reasonable time relating to when they left. This would negate the whole purpose of time travel altogether.   So, Is Time Travel to the Past Really Possible? In Back to the Future a specially outfitted DeLorean was the vehicle that took the movies characters back and forth in time. Charles Eshelman /  Ã‚  Getty Images   Possible? Yes, theoretically. Probable? No, at least not with our current technology and understanding of physics. But perhaps someday, thousands of years into the future, people could harness enough energy to make time travel a reality. Until that time, the idea will just have to stay relegated to the pages of science-fiction or for viewers to make repeated showings of Back to the Future.   Edited by Carolyn Collins Petersen.

Motivation of Money in Oak Island Money Pit by Lee Lamb

Many people in the world are motivated by money. Whether in the form of treasure or cash, people will come looking for it. The mystery of a money pit off the shores of Nova Scotia, Canada has attracted treasure hunters for hundreds of years. Scientists have been trying to discover not only what lies at the bottom, but also how the treasure got to Oak Island. Although there is much disagreement about who left the treasure behind on Oak Island, the most logical explanation is that the British created the money pit in the mid 16th century for safe keeping of their newly acclaimed treasure. Oak Island is an uninhabited 140 acre island located just off the shores of Nova Scotia, Canada. It is part of a chain of approximately 360 islands in Mahone Bay (Scott). Despite such a small area, this island is home to the historically famous Oak Island Money Pit. This mystery has brought thousands of people to the island in hopes of finding buried treasure. Most people are unsuccessful while lookin g for the treasure, and leave the island with same superstitions they came with. The chapter in history regarding Oak Island Money Pit occurred when it was first discovered in the summer of 1795. Dan McGinnis, a teenager who lived on the shore of nearby Nova Scotia, reportedly saw strange lights on the island. McGinnis boarded a small canoe alone to explore the island late that night. Upon first exploration, he found a large hole in the ground measuring 13 feet in diameter. He alsoShow MoreRelatedLogical Reasoning189930 Words   |  760 PagesAcknowledgments For the 1993 edition: The following friends and colleagues deserve thanks for their help and encouragement with this project: Clifford Anderson, Hellan Roth Dowden, Louise Dowden, Robert Foreman, Richard Gould, Kenneth King, Marjorie Lee, Elizabeth Perry, Heidi Wackerli, Perry Weddle, Tiffany Whetstone, and the following reviewers: David Adams, California State Polytechnic University; Stanley Baronett, Jr., University of Nevada-Las Vegas; Shirley J. Bell, University of Arkansas at