Download or read book Facing the Torturer written by Francois Bizot and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the acclaimed memoir The Gate now gives us a mesmerizing account of his personal relationship with one of the most infamous torturers of the twentieth century, and of his transformative experience observing and participating in that man’s recent trial for war crimes. In 1971, François Bizot was researching Khmer pottery and Buddhist ritual in rural Cambodia when, along with two Cambodian assistants, he was arrested by Communist guerrillas on suspicion of being an American spy. In captivity, Bizot would establish an unlikely rapport with his interrogator, Comrade Duch, a twenty-nine-year-old former math teacher, now commander of the jungle encampment. After many long conversations, Duch would become convinced of Bizot’s innocence, finally deciding to release his prisoner against the wishes of his superiors, including one Saloth Sar—the future Pol Pot. And so it was on Christmas Day 1971 that Bizot was allowed to depart the camp but obliged to leave his assistants behind. In 1999, Bizot would hear of the arrest of the “butcher of Tuol Sleng.” This was the nom de guerre that Comrade Duch had earned after releasing Bizot and proceeding to exterminate some ten thousand Cambodians, including Bizot’s assistants, Lay and Son. Duch’s unexpected capture after years in hiding presented François Bizot with his first opportunity to confront the man who’d held him captive for three months and whose strange sense of justice had resulted in Bizot’s being the only Westerner to survive imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge. The arrest also forced Bizot to confront a paradox: How could the man who’d been his savior have become one of the most monstrous perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide? Taking part in the trial as a witness, with Duch the sole defendant, would return Bizot to the heart of darkness. This is the testimony of what he discovered—about the torturer and about himself—on that harrowing journey.
Download or read book Facing the Torturer written by François Bizot and published by Rider. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1971, Francois Bizot was kept prisoner for three months in the Cambodian jungle, accused of being a CIA spy. His Khymer Rouge captor, Comrade Duch, eventually had him freed and it took Bizot decades to realize he owed his life to a man who, later in the Killing Fields regime, was to become one of Pol Pot's most infamous henchmen. As the head of the Tuol Sleng S-21 jail, Duch personally oversaw the detention, systematic torture and execution of more than 16,000 detainees. Duch's trial as a war criminal began in Phnom Penh in March 09 and ended in July 2010 amid a blaze of publicity. He was sentenced to a controversial 35 years imprisonment. In the tradition of Gitta Sereny, who sat with Speer in the Nuremberg trials, and Hannah Arendt's reports from Eichmann's trial, Bizot attended Duch's court case and spent time with him in prison, trying to unearth whatever humanity he has left. If Duch was going to talk to anyone, it was Bizot, whom he still referred to as his 'friend'. 'It would be all too easy,' says Bizot, 'if this man was a monster, not a member of the human race. We could use the slogan 'never again' and move on. But the deep horror is that this man is normal, that in other circumstances he could have been an effective and well-liked manager, an honest and incorruptible civil servant. Through his very qualities he became a mass murderer. Does that exonerate him from the crimes? Certainly not. But it does force us to question ourelves in a way that is deeply unsettling.' At once a personal essay, a historical and philosophical meditation, and an eye-witness account, Facing the Torturer will join a very short list of important books about man's personal responsibility in collective crimes.
Download or read book A Miracle a Universe written by Lawrence Weschler and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years as countries around the globe have begun to move from dictatorial to more democratic systems of governance, no more traumatic (or dramatic) ethical problem has arisen than what to do with the previous regime’s torturers. In most cases, the security and military apparatuses, responsible for the overwhelming majority of human-rights abuses, still retain tremendous power—and will not abide any settling of accounts. Now, New Yorker staff reporter Lawrence Weschler tells the extraordinary story of how, against tremendous odds, torture victims and human-rights activists in two Latin American countries—Brazil and Uruguay—tried to bring their torturers to justice and to rehabilitate their whole societies from harrowing periods of silence and repression. In this first of his two accounts, he tells how a tiny group of torture victims, clerics, and human-rights activists in Brazil launched an extremely risky, nonviolent plot to get even with the former torturers by publishing an indisputable account of their savage system of repression—indisputable because it is drawn from the regime’s own files. In the second, set in Uruguay, he tells how a more broadly-based movement attempted to bring to light the dark history of a military regime engaged in more political incarceration per capita than any other on earth at that time. In this illuminating and beautifully written book (portions of which appeared in five issues of The New Yorker), Weschler examines what a small number of individuals can do to retrieve history and truth from the hands of torturers.
Download or read book The Gate written by Francois Bizot and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot was taken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained in a jungle camp for months before releasing him. Four years later Bizot became the intermediary between the now victorious Khmer Rouge and the occupants of the besieged French embassy in Phnom Penh, eventually leading a desperate convoy of foreigners to safety across the Thai border. Out of those ordeals comes this transfixing book. At its center lies the relationship between Bizot and his principal captor, a man named Douch, who is today known as the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge’s torturers but who, for a while, was Bizot’s protector and friend. Written with the immediacy of a great novel, unsparing in its understanding of evil, The Gate manages to be at once wrenching and redemptive.
Download or read book Women Unsilenced written by Jeanne Sarson and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women Unsilenced explores the impact of unthinkable violence committed against women and girls through multiple perspectives—women’s recall of life-threatening ordeals of torture, human trafficking, and organized crime, society’s failure to recognize and address such crimes, and close examinations of how justice, health, political, and social systems perpetuate revictimizing trauma. Written by retired public health nurses who include their own experiences helped give voice and understanding to women who have been silenced. This book discloses their “underground” caring work and offers “kitchen table” research and insights, using women’s storytelling on multiple platforms to educate readers on the unimaginable layers of perpetrators’ modus operandi of violence, manipulation, and deceit. At times raw, painful, and shocking, this book is an important resource for those who have survived such crimes; professionals who support those victimized by torturers and traffickers; police, legal professionals, criminologists, human rights activists, and educators alike. It reveals how healing and claiming one’s relationship with/to/for Self is possible.
Download or read book The Torture Machine written by Flint Taylor and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s political machine, from aldermen to the mayor’s office. [TAYLOR’s BOOK] takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed—through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department’s “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.
Download or read book Unspeakable Acts Ordinary People written by John Conroy and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-09-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of torture (in the name of the state) in three democracies (Israel, Northern Ireland, and the United States) by John Conroy, a Chicago journalist with a strong following among readers who know his previous book (a war diary of life in Belfast).
Download or read book Tortured for Christ written by Richard Wurmbrand and published by . This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian pastor, was tortured and imprisoned for a total of 14 years by Communists for his Christian faith. This book documents how he and other Christians suffered for their Christian witness behind the Iron Curtain.
Download or read book The Shadow of the Torturer written by Gene Wolfe and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So begins one of the most celebrated stories in fantasy literature . . . packed full of mystery, deep themes and incredible prose, meet Severian the Torturer and follow him on his journey across the great world of Urth Severian is a torturer, born to the guild and with an exceptionally promising career ahead of him . . . until he falls in love with one of his victims, a beautiful young noblewoman. Her excruciations are delayed for some months and, out of love, Severian helps her commit suicide and escape her fate. For a torturer, there is no more unforgivable act. In punishment he is exiled from the guild and his home city to the distant metropolis of Thrax with little more than Terminus Est, a fabled sword, to his name. Along the way he has to learn to survive in a wider world without the guild - a world in which he has already made both allies and enemies. And a strange gem is about to fall into his possession, which will only make his enemies pursue him with ever-more determination . . . Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1981 Winner of the BSFA Award for best novel, 1982 Readers can't stop reading The Shadow of the Torturer: 'Full of rich characters and great imagination' Mark Lawrence, author of Red Sister 'A dark jewel . . . He has a mastery of language not often seen in fantasy writing . . . Couple this with an original and unique, highly imaginative and complex worldbuilding and the high praise is warranted' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'This is a picaresque fantasy with a difference, for our hero Severian is no wide-eyed country boy from the shire, but an apprentice torturer, thoroughly schooled in his trade' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'There are certain books that can be considered life-changing experiences. Gene Wolfe is an author who has written one of those for me' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'The Book of the New Sun Tetralogy is one of the great achievements in science fiction and is a MUST READ for fans of the genre. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!!' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'In addition to being unique in style, The Shadow of the Torturer is a gorgeous piece of work: passionate storytelling (heart-wrenching in places), fascinating insights into nature and the human condition, beautiful prose' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 'Genre fiction at its finest. Original, difficult and well-crafted, it is easy to see how Wolfe is regarded as a writer's writer' Goodreads reviewer, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
Download or read book Kill Boxes Facing the Legacy of US Sponsored Torture Indefinite Detention and Drone Warfare written by Elisabeth Weber and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kill Boxes addresses the legacy of US-sponsored torture, indefinite detention, and drone warfare by deciphering the shocks of recognition that humanistic and artistic responses to violence bring to consciousness if readers and viewers have eyes to face them.Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which the hooded man from Abu Ghraib became iconic, subsequent chapters take up less culturally visible scenes of massive violations of human rights to bring us face to face with these shocks and the forms of recognition that they enable and disavow. We are addressed in the photo of the hooded man, all the more so as he was brutally prevented, in our name, from returning the camera's and thus our gaze. We are addressed in the screams that turn a person, tortured in our name, into howling flesh. We are addressed in poems written in the Guantánamo Prison camp, however much American authorities try to censor them, in our name. We are addressed by the victims of the US drone wars, however little American citizens may have heard the names of the places obliterated by the bombs for which their taxes pay. And we know that we are addressed in spite of a number of strategies of brutal refusal of heeding those calls.Providing intensive readings of philosophical texts by Jean Améry, Jacques Derrida, and Christian Thomasius, with poetic texts by Franz Kafka, Paul Muldoon, and the poet-detainees of Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp, and with artistic creations by Sallah Edine Sallat, the American artist collective Forkscrew and an international artist collective from Pakistan, France and the US, Kill Boxes demonstrates the complexity of humanistic responses to crimes committed in the name of national security. The conscious or unconscious knowledge that we are addressed by the victims of these crimes is a critical factor in discussions on torture, on indefinite detention without trial, as practiced in Guantánamo, and in debates on the strategies to circumvent the latter altogether, as practiced in drone warfare and its extrajudicial assassination program.The volume concludes with an Afterword by Richard Falk.
Download or read book Man or Monster written by Alexander Laban Hinton and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as evil, his defense lawyers claimed he simply followed orders. In Man or Monster? Alexander Hinton uses creative ethnographic writing, extensive fieldwork, hundreds of interviews, and his experience attending Duch's trial to create a nuanced analysis of Duch, the tribunal, the Khmer Rouge, and the after-effects of Cambodia's genocide. Interested in how a person becomes a torturer and executioner as well as the law's ability to grapple with crimes against humanity, Hinton adapts Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" to consider how the potential for violence is embedded in the everyday ways people articulate meaning and comprehend the world. Man or Monster? provides novel ways to consider justice, terror, genocide, memory, truth, and humanity.
Download or read book Why Not Torture Terrorists written by Yuval Ginbar and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2008-03-27 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book addresses a dilemma at the heart of the 'War on Terror': is it ever justifiable to torture terrorists in order to save the lives of innocent civilians; the so-called 'ticking bomb' scenario?The book first analyzes the ticking bomb dilemma as a pure moral one, facing the individual would-be torturer. A 'never-say-never' utilitarian position is pitted against a 'minimal absolutist' view that some acts are never justifiable, and that torture is one such act.It then looks at the issues that arise once a state has decided to sanction torture in extreme situations: when, how, and whom to torture; the institutionalization of torture; its effects on society; and its efficacy in combatting terrorism in the shorter and longer runs.Four models of legalized torture are next examined-including current ones in Israel and the USA and the idea of torture warrants.Finally, related legal issues are analyzed; among them the lawfulness of coercive interrogation under international law and attempts to allow torture 'only' after the fact, for instance by applying the criminal law defence of necessity.A 'minimal absolutist' view - under which torture, whether by private individuals or by state officials, must be prohibited absolutely in law, policy and practice, and allowing no exceptions for ticking bomb situations - is defended throughout.
Download or read book The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture Academic Edition written by Senate Select Committee On Intelligence and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study edition of book the Los Angeles Times called, "The most extensive review of U.S. intelligence-gathering tactics in generations." This is the complete Executive Summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the CIA's interrogation and detention programs -- a.k.a., The Torture Report. Based on over six million pages of secret CIA documents, the report details a covert program of secret prisons, prisoner deaths, interrogation practices, and cooperation with other foreign and domestic agencies, as well as the CIA's efforts to hide the details of the program from the White House, the Department of Justice, the Congress, and the American people. Over five years in the making, it is presented here exactly as redacted and released by the United States government on December 9, 2014, with an introduction by Daniel J. Jones, who led the Senate investigation. This special edition includes: • Large, easy-to-read format. • Almost 3,000 notes formatted as footnotes, exactly as they appeared in the original report. This allows readers to see obscured or clarifying details as they read the main text. • An introduction by Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones who led the investigation and wrote the report for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a forward by the head of that committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Download or read book The Cinema of Rithy Panh written by Leslie Barnes and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-16 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in 1964, Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh grew up in the midst of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal reign of terror, which claimed the lives of many of his relatives. After escaping to France, where he attended film school, he returned to his homeland in the late 1980s and began work on the documentaries and fiction films that have made him Cambodia’s most celebrated living director. The fourteen essays in The Cinema of Rithy Panh explore the filmmaker’s unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.” They consider how Panh represents Cambodia’s traumatic past, combining forms of individual and collective remembrance, and the implications of this past for Cambodia’s transition into a global present. Covering documentary and feature films, including his literary adaptations of Marguerite Duras and Kenzaburō Ōe, they examine how Panh’s attention to local context leads to a deep understanding of such major themes in global cinema as justice, imperialism, diaspora, gender, and labor. Offering fresh takes on masterworks like The Missing Picture and S-21 while also shining a light on the director’s lesser-known films, The Cinema of Rithy Panh will give readers a new appreciation for the boundless creativity and ethical sensitivity of one of Southeast Asia’s cinematic visionaries.
Download or read book Nineteen Eighty Four written by George Orwell and published by epubli. This book was released on 2021-01-09 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel", often published as "1984", is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated. The story takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a totalitarian superstate named Oceania that is ruled by the Party who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother, the leader of the Party, enjoys an intense cult of personality despite the fact that he may not even exist. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker and Outer Party member who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He enters into a forbidden relationship with a colleague, Julia, and starts to remember what life was like before the Party came to power.
Download or read book Terrorism Ticking Time Bombs and Torture written by Fritz Allhoff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative philosophical investigation into the ethics of torture, The War on Terror, and making tough choices in exceptional circumstances. The general consensus among philosophers is that the use of torture is never justified. In Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture, Fritz Allhoff demonstrates the weakness of the case against torture; while allowing that torture constitutes a moral wrong, he nevertheless argues that, in exceptional cases, it represents the lesser of two evils. Allhoff does not take this position lightly. He begins by examining the way terrorism challenges traditional norms, discussing the morality of various practices of torture, and critically exploring the infamous ticking time-bomb scenario. After carefully considering these issues from a purely philosophical perspective, he turns to the empirical ramifications of his arguments, addressing criticisms of torture and analyzing the impact its adoption could have on democracy, institutional structures, and foreign policy. The crucial questions of how to justly authorize torture and how to set limits on its use make up the final section of this timely, provocative, and carefully argued book.
Download or read book Red Dust written by Gillian Slovo and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2002 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Perhaps the most important piece of fiction yet to emerge from the new South Africa." "San Francisco Chronicle "
