Torture In Night By Elie

About two years ago, a C.I.A. torture report was released, the subject on detainees captured after September 11, who were suspected to be linked to the attack. One of the more famous detainees, Majid Khan, who had been afflicted with Al Qaeda, was captured in 2003 and was held at Guantanamo Bay since 2006. He says that the interrogators waterboarded him twice, was moved among series of C.I.A. operated “black sites” over some months, and the torture still continued. He was beaten repeatedly, hung from a wooden beam for three days, and shackled and starved. He was even submerged in an ice bath, the transparent ice burning his skin like fire, slowly numbing his body. Majid Khan isn’t the only one who has gone through intense torture like this.

Elie, a boy that survived the events of the Holocaust, had caught Idek, one of the officers who worked in the concentration camps, with a young Polish girl, half-naked, on a mattress. This infuriated Idek, so he punished Elie during roll call by whipping him twenty-five times on his back. This causes Elie to faint, and the whipping was so bad to where he couldn’t even get up. Elie says, “‘Get up!’ he yelled more loudly…At Idek’s command, two prisoners lifted me up and led me in front of him. ‘Look me in the eye!’ I looked at him without seeing him. I was thinking of my father. He must have suffered more than I did. ‘Listen to me, you bastard!’ said Idek, coldly. ‘That’s for your curiosity. You’ll get five times more if you dare tell anyone what you saw! Understood?’” (Wiesel 42). The commands, threats, and the derogatory name Idek says to Elie shows how the torturer, Idek, feels toward Elie―a superior. Because Elie was a Jew, Jews were treated inhumanly. The officers in the Holocaust could take this as an advantage to treat them cruelly. Since the torturee doesn’t have power over the torturer, the torture can make the torturee become obedient to the commands of the torturer. From Night, after the quote, it said that Elie nodded his head several times, which shows how the torture scared him and made him obedient to someone who was wrong in what he did. So from

From an article by Lauren Neergaard, titled “Torture can affect the brain, leaving long-term psychological scars,” which is about how a torture report was released on the harsh interrogation program of the C.I.A. A doctor named Vincent lacopino, an adviser to the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights explains how torture affects the brain. It says, “Even a few days of sleep deprivation fog the mind, he noted, while sensory deprivation can lead to hallucinations and other symptoms of psychosis” (PBS). Your emotions can also become amplified, like your anger or sadness, which can then become depression. Sleep deprivation can cause memory problems, which is just one of the many mental effects. Sleep deprivation can cause cognitive impairments like reduced short term memory and fragmented thought processes. This would be an issue for someone because you wouldn’t be able to function as you normally would, which would cause problems in your everyday life. Sensory deprivation can affect you psychologically, causing you to become over or under sensitive to things, like over reacting or sometimes showing no emotion. Compared to how a person would usually respond, you might over react or show no emotion. So from my research, I learned how torture doesn’t only affect you physically, but in other ways as