Download or read book American Torture from the Philippines to Iraq written by William L. d'Ambruoso and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What explains the United States' persistent use of torture over the past hundred-plus years? Not only is torture incompatible with liberal values; it is also risky and frequently ineffective as an interrogation method. In American Torture from the Philippines to Iraq, William L. d'Ambruoso argues that the norm against torture has two features that help explain why liberal democracies like the United States have continued to violate it. First, the norm against torture paradoxically contributes to the belief that torture works. In naming certain behaviors as appropriate, norms also define what is inappropriate. Some policymakers and soldiers believe (not always unreasonably) that in the nasty world of international politics, cheaters--those who are willing to break the rules--have an advantage, especially in security matters. Bad becomes good because it appears effective, and rule-following is perceived as naïve and dangerous. Second, the anti-torture norm is not sufficiently specified to draw a definitive line between norm-compliant behavior and violations. For example, it is impossible to specify exactly how many hours must pass before forced standing becomes torture. As a result of torture's blurry definition, perpetrators can justify their actions by suggesting that the adversary is guilty of worse behavior, by using euphemisms such as enhanced interrogation, or by flatly denying that an act is torture. In short, lack of specificity leads to justifications and redefinitions, which in turn enable transgressions. Drawing on previously overlooked archival testimony from the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), the Vietnam War, and the post-2001 war on terror, d'Ambruoso shows that the rationale for using torture has remained remarkably consistent throughout the past century.
Download or read book Torture and Truth written by Mark Danner and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revelation of widespread torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib shocked the world. In this, the first book of its kind, leading investigative journalist Mark Danner reveals just how complicit the US government was (and remains) in allowing and condoning such abuse.
Download or read book Talking About Torture written by Jared Del Rosso and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the photographs depicting torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were released in 2004, U.S. politicians attributed the incident to a few bad apples in the American military, exonerated high-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration, promoted Guantánamo as a model prison, and dismissed the illegality of the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation." By the end of the Bush administration, members of both major congressional parties had come to denounce enhanced interrogation as torture and argue for the closing of Guantánamo. What initiated this shift? In Talking About Torture, Jared Del Rosso reviews transcripts from congressional hearings and scholarship on denial, torture, and state violence to document this wholesale change in rhetoric and attitude toward the use of torture by the CIA and the U.S. military during the War on Terror. He plots the evolution of the "torture issue" in U.S. politics and its manipulation by politicians to serve various ends. Most important, Talking About Torture integrates into the debate about torture the testimony of those who suffered under American interrogation practices and demonstrates how the conversation continues to influence current counterterrorism policies, such as the reliance on drones.
Download or read book Honor in the Dust written by Gregg Jones and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-23 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fascinating.”—New York Times Book Review • “Well-written.”—The Boston Globe • “Extraordinary.”—The Christian Science Monitor • “A compelling page-turner.”—Adam Hochschild On the eve of a new century, an up-and-coming Theodore Roosevelt set out to transform the U.S. into a major world power. The Spanish-American War would forever change America's standing in global affairs, and drive the young nation into its own imperial showdown in the Philippines. From Admiral George Dewey's legendary naval victory in Manila Bay to the Rough Riders' heroic charge up San Juan Hill, from Roosevelt's rise to the presidency to charges of U.S. military misconduct in the Philippines, Honor in the Dust brilliantly captures an era brimming with American optimism and confidence as the nation expanded its influence abroad.
Download or read book Policing America s Empire written by Alfred W. McCoy and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day. But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War. “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University “Conclusively, McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire is an impressive historical piece of research that appeals not only to Southeast Asianists but also to those interested in examining the historical embedding and institutional ontogenesis of post-colonial states’ police power apparatuses and their apparently inherent propensity to implement illiberal practices of surveillance and repression.”—Salvador Santino F. Regilme, Jr., Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs “McCoy’s remarkable book . . . does justice both to its author’s deep knowledge of Philippine history as well as to his rare expertise in unmasking the seamy undersides of state power.”—POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize, Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies
Download or read book Overthrow written by Stephen Kinzer and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-02-06 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning author tells the stories of the audacious American politicians, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers of other countries with disastrous long-term consequences.
Download or read book A Question of Torture written by Alfred McCoy and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A startling exposé of the CIA's development and spread of psychological torture, from the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and beyond In this revelatory account of the CIA's secret, fifty-year effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy uncovers the deep, disturbing roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Far from aberrations, as the White House has claimed, A Question of Torture shows that these abuses are the product of a long-standing covert program of interrogation. Developed at the cost of billions of dollars, the CIA's method combined "sensory deprivation" and "self-inflicted pain" to create a revolutionary psychological approach—the first innovation in torture in centuries. The simple techniques—involving isolation, hooding, hours of standing, extremes of hot and cold, and manipulation of time—constitute an all-out assault on the victim's senses, destroying the basis of personal identity. McCoy follows the years of research—which, he reveals, compromised universities and the U.S. Army—and the method's dissemination, from Vietnam through Iran to Central America. He traces how after 9/11 torture became Washington's weapon of choice in both the CIA's global prisons and in "torture-friendly" countries to which detainees are dispatched. Finally McCoy argues that information extracted by coercion is worthless, making a case for the legal approach favored by the FBI. Scrupulously documented and grippingly told, A Question of Torture is a devastating indictment of inhumane practices that have spread throughout the intelligence system, damaging American's laws, military, and international standing.
Download or read book Benevolent Assimilation written by Stuart Creighton Miller and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1984-09-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "American acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 became a focal point for debate on American imperialism and the course the country was to take now that the Western frontier had been conquered. U.S. military leaders in Manila, unequipped to understand the aspirations of the native revolutionary movement, failed to respond to Filipino overtures of accommodation and provoked a war with the revolutionary army. Back home, an impressive opposition to the war developed on largely ideological grounds, but in the end it was the interminable and increasingly bloody guerrilla warfare that disillusioned America in its imperialistic venture. This book presents a searching exploration of the history of America's reactions to Asian people, politics, and wars of independence." -- Book Jacket
Download or read book Civilizing Torture written by W. Fitzhugh Brundage and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize Finalist Silver Gavel Award Finalist “A sobering history of how American communities and institutions have relied on torture in various forms since before the United States was founded.” —Los Angeles Times “That Americans as a people and a nation-state are violent is indisputable. That we are also torturers, domestically and internationally, is not so well established. The myth that we are not torturers will persist, but Civilizing Torture will remain a powerful antidote in confronting it.” —Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell “Remarkable...A searing analysis of America’s past that helps make sense of its bewildering present.” —David Garland, author of Peculiar Institution Most Americans believe that a civilized state does not torture, but that belief has repeatedly been challenged in moments of crisis at home and abroad. From the Indian wars to Vietnam, from police interrogation to the War on Terror, US institutions have proven far more amenable to torture than the nation’s commitment to liberty would suggest. Civilizing Torture traces the history of debates about the efficacy of torture and reveals a recurring struggle to decide what limits to impose on the power of the state. At a time of escalating rhetoric aimed at cleansing the nation of the undeserving and an erosion of limits on military power, the debate over torture remains critical and unresolved.
Download or read book Fiasco written by Thomas E. Ricks and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-07-25 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • One of the Washington Post Book World's 10 Best Books of the Year • Time's 10 Best Books of the Year • USA Today's Nonfiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book "Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The best account yet of the entire war." —Vanity Fair The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account—explosive, shocking, and authoritative—of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.
Download or read book Getting Away with Torture written by Reed Brody and published by . This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recommendations -- Background: official sanction for crimes against detainees -- Torture of detainees in US counterterrorism operations -- Individual criminal responsibility -- Appendix: foreign state proceedings regarding US detainee mistreatment -- Acknowledgments and methodology.
Download or read book American Invasions Canada to Afghanistan 1775 to 2010 written by Rocky M. Mirza Ph.D and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Invasions: Canada to Afghanistan, 1775 to 2010 is a thought-provoking analysis of the reasons for American invasions and warmongering over the last two centuries. Contrary to the views expressed by the Western media and Western historians the American Empire is not a force for the promotion of free thinking and democracy but instead a force for imperial conquests and imposed dictatorships through the use of a military-industrial complex, fed by the American Empire outspending the rest of the world combined, on weapons of mass destruction. The American Empire has used and will continue to use the most sophisticated weapons, from nuclear bombs to bunker-busting bombs to land mines to chemical and biological weapons, on defenseless men, women, and children to feed its insatiable appetite for warmongering and imperial expansion. It combines military bases around the world with military prisons used for torture and extraction of information. Its navy patrols every corner of the globe, and its planes can rain down bombs from the heavens on every civilian on the planet.
Download or read book Indian Wars Everywhere written by Stefan Aune and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation "Geronimo" used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere, Stefan Aune shows how these resonances signal a deeper history, one in which the Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence. The United States' formative acts of colonial violence persist in the actions, imaginations, and stories that have facilitated the spread of American empire, from the "savage wars" of the nineteenth century to the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. Ranging across centuries and continents, Indian Wars Everywhere considers what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be deemed a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.
Download or read book Bound by War written by Christopher Capozzola and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping history of America's long and fateful military relationship with the Philippines amid a century of Pacific warfare Ever since US troops occupied the Philippines in 1898, generations of Filipinos have served in and alongside the US armed forces. In Bound by War, historian Christopher Capozzola reveals this forgotten history, showing how war and military service forged an enduring, yet fraught, alliance between Americans and Filipinos. As the US military expanded in Asia, American forces confronted their Pacific rivals from Philippine bases. And from the colonial-era Philippine Scouts to post-9/11 contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, Filipinos were crucial partners in the exercise of US power. Their service reshaped Philippine society and politics and brought thousands of Filipinos to America. Telling the epic story of a century of conflict and migration, Bound by War is a fresh, definitive portrait of this uneven partnership and the two nations it transformed.
Download or read book America in the Philippines 1899 1902 written by Christopher J. Einolf and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America in the Philippines, 1899-1902: The First Torture Scandal analyzes the US army's use of the 'water cure' torture in the Philippine War and the ensuing political scandal that resulted. Drawing on primary source documents to construct a detailed narrative history of the events, the book also proposes an original theory for the causes of torture, which emphasizes the moral agency of low-level actors. Einolf uses the historical debate to illuminate theories of present-day human rights advocacy. The conclusion relates the Philippine War case to the more recent use of torture under the George W. Bush administration and makes recommendations for researchers and advocates.
Download or read book The Gulf Between Us written by Cynthia B. Acree and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The compelling true story of Col. Cliff Acree and Cynthia Acree, two high school sweethearts whose lives were torn apart by the Gulf War.
Download or read book How to Hide an Empire written by Daniel Immerwahr and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.
