Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions (UN General Assembly 1984). According to the US Assembly torture is never supposed to be used ; "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a public or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture  and also violates the person's civil liberties which are personal guarantees and freedoms that the government cannot abridge, either by law or by judicial interpretation (US Assembly 1984). Torture is used by many including our US government however and there are six common reasons for torture : to obtain a confession (judicial torture), to obtain information (interrogational torture), to punish (penal torture), to intimidate or coerce the sufferer or others to act certain ways (terroristic or ˜deterrent' torture, to destroy opponents without killing them (disabling torture), and to please the torturer or others (recreational torture). (Majima 138). There has been many arguments to combat the idea of state-sponsored torture, including Vittorio Bufacchi, Jean Maria Arrigo, Jessica Wolfendale, and David Luban. Bufacchi and Arrigo claimed that the positive outcomes of torture do not outweigh the negatives and would lead to torture becoming a permissible part of any democratic society accessible by military, police departments, and other legal establishments (Springer 489). Jessica Wolfendale focused more on the torturer and stated that "in order to have torture, you must have a torturer, and in order to have a good torturer, you must train someone to be one. Alan Dershowitz had a different and possibly more controversial approach. He suggested that torture is justifiable and therefore ought to be endorsed by the legal system in the case of the ticking bomb is a noteworthy example of this (Stout 490). He does not think it should be normal, he did believe it could be warranted. In the case of extreme circumstances on the condition that it is accompanied by a valid judicial warrant, Dershowitz believes that torture can be necessary. This was the beginning of a massive change in the thought process of torture. Recently, especially after the 9/11 attacks, there has been many academic debates on torture and the morality of it. Once "off-limits , torture is now being widely discussed and considered legitimate in popular discourse (Eyal 1-3). This was demonstrated in August 2002 when the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified , and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations  conducted in President Bush's war on terrorism. (Smith par 1) That basically means that if a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist network. This basically redefined the concept of torture and changed it to only be illegal if it causes a pain so physically and mentally damaging that it causes ˜lasting psychological harm' (Greenburg par 4). Most argued that torture could be justified in certain exceptional circumstances (