Download or read book Tortured Confessions written by Ervand Abrahamian and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of torture in recent Iranian politics is the subject of Ervand Abrahamian's important and disturbing book. Although Iran officially banned torture in the early twentieth century, Abrahamian provides documentation of its use under the Shahs and of the widespread utilization of torture and public confession under the Islamic Republican governments. His study is based on an extensive body of material, including Amnesty International reports, prison literature, and victims' accounts that together give the book a chilling immediacy. According to human rights organizations, Iran has been at the forefront of countries using systematic physical torture in recent years, especially for political prisoners. Is the government's goal to ensure social discipline? To obtain information? Neither seem likely, because torture is kept secret and victims are brutalized until something other than information is obtained: a public confession and ideological recantation. For the victim, whose honor, reputation, and self-respect are destroyed, the act is a form of suicide. In Iran a subject's "voluntary confession" reaches a huge audience via television. The accessibility of television and use of videotape have made such confessions a primary propaganda tool, says Abrahamian, and because torture is hidden from the public, the victim's confession appears to be self-motivated, increasing its value to the authorities. Abrahamian compares Iran's public recantations to campaigns in Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, and the religious inquisitions of early modern Europe, citing the eerie resemblance in format, language, and imagery. Designed to win the hearts and minds of the masses, such public confessions—now enhanced by technology—continue as a means to legitimize those in power and to demonize "the enemy."
Download or read book Tortured Confessions written by Ervand Abrahamian and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of torture in recent Iranian politics is the subject of Ervand Abrahamian's important and disturbing book. Although Iran officially banned torture in the early twentieth century, Abrahamian provides documentation of its use under the Shahs and of the widespread utilization of torture and public confession under the Islamic Republican governments. His study is based on an extensive body of material, including Amnesty International reports, prison literature, and victims' accounts that together give the book a chilling immediacy. According to human rights organizations, Iran has been at the forefront of countries using systematic physical torture in recent years, especially for political prisoners. Is the government's goal to ensure social discipline? To obtain information? Neither seem likely, because torture is kept secret and victims are brutalized until something other than information is obtained: a public confession and ideological recantation. For the victim, whose honor, reputation, and self-respect are destroyed, the act is a form of suicide. In Iran a subject's "voluntary confession" reaches a huge audience via television. The accessibility of television and use of videotape have made such confessions a primary propaganda tool, says Abrahamian, and because torture is hidden from the public, the victim's confession appears to be self-motivated, increasing its value to the authorities. Abrahamian compares Iran's public recantations to campaigns in Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, and the religious inquisitions of early modern Europe, citing the eerie resemblance in format, language, and imagery. Designed to win the hearts and minds of the masses, such public confessions—now enhanced by technology—continue as a means to legitimize those in power and to demonize "the enemy."
Download or read book Tortured into Fake Confession written by Raymond B. Lech and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1952, during the Korean War, Colonel Frank H. Schwable became the second-highest-ranking officer held as a prisoner of war by the Communists. His captivity was marked by months of physical and psychological torture that resulted in a signed confession asserting that the United States had used germ warfare on Korean civilians. This serious allegation reverberated throughout the American media with devastating consequences to Col. Schwable’s reputation. Once he was released, an official Marine Corps inquiry was made into his false confession and uncovered the effect psychological torture had on a distinguished and decorated officer’s actions.
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 Confessions of Witches Under Torture 1617 written by and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Why Torture Doesn t Work written by Shane O'Mara and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Torture is banned because it is cruel and inhumane. But as Shane O’Mara writes in this account of the human brain under stress, another reason torture should never be condoned is because it does not work the way torturers assume it does. In countless films and TV shows such as Homeland and 24, torture is portrayed as a harsh necessity. If cruelty can extract secrets that will save lives, so be it. CIA officers and others conducted torture using precisely this justification. But does torture accomplish what its defenders say it does? For ethical reasons, there are no scientific studies of torture. But neuroscientists know a lot about how the brain reacts to fear, extreme temperatures, starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, and immersion in freezing water, all tools of the torturer’s trade. These stressors create problems for memory, mood, and thinking, and sufferers predictably produce information that is deeply unreliable—and, for intelligence purposes, even counterproductive. As O’Mara guides us through the neuroscience of suffering, he reveals the brain to be much more complex than the brute calculations of torturers have allowed, and he points the way to a humane approach to interrogation, founded in the science of brain and behavior. Torture may be effective in forcing confessions, as in Stalin’s Russia. But if we want information that we can depend on to save lives, O’Mara writes, our model should be Napoleon: “It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.”
Download or read book Confessions of Guilt written by George Conner Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extreme interrogation tactics permitted after the 9/11 attacks illustrate that the level of fear in society can influence the law of interrogation. In light of controversial water boarding policies and extraterritorial detention centers, what is the basis for interrogation law in the United States? What is the historical precedent for giving potential criminals the right to "remain silent" or confess to a crime? In Confessions of Guilt, esteemed scholars of law and criminal procedure George Thomas and Richard Leo tell the story of how, over the centuries, the law of interrogation moved from indifference about extreme pressure to concern over the slightest pressure, and back again. Demonstrating that the law of interrogation is inherently unstable and highly dependent on the perceived levels of threat felt by a society, the authors shed light on the nuanced and fascinating history of interrogation practices, both new and old.
Download or read book Confessions of Witches Under Torture 1617 written by J. L. Pitt and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Confessions of Witches Under Torture, 1617 Confessions of Witches Under Torture, 1617 was written by J. L. Pitt in 1886. This is a 60 page book, containing 2701 words. Search Inside is enabled for this title. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Download or read book The Torture Letters written by Laurence Ralph and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
Download or read book Tortured Subjects written by Lisa Silverman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period. Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.
Download or read book Confessions at Any Cost written by Diederik Lohman and published by Human Rights Watch. This book was released on 1999 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Council of Europe
Download or read book Confessions of Witches Under Torture 1617 Classic Reprint written by J. L. Pitt and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2018-03-11 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Confessions of Witches Under Torture, 1617 His Majesty [james L], after voluntarily submitting themselves, both upon the general inquest of the country, and after having been several times brought up before the Court, heard, examined, and confronted. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Download or read book Tortured by Blue written by Chicago Torture Victims and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2019-02 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The torture ring that operated out of Chicago Police Department Area 2 and 3 headquarters for more than two decades is one of the most terrible and harrowing stories of injustice to take place in my lifetime. Journalists, lawyers and activists played their part in exposing this nightmare, but the victims of police torture themselves did the most to make the truth known, and against steep odds, they were heard. Jon Burge may have never seen the inside of a jail cell like he should have, but thanks in large part to Stanley Howard and the other authors of this book, he will never be remembered as anything other than a monstrous criminal. This book tells the story of police torture in Chicago from the inside—literally—and when you read it, you’ll agree that no one has done a better job of telling all of it. Nothing can ever make up for the injustices these men suffered. But if we can stop this state-sponsored crime from ever happening again, we will have Stanley, Mark, Marvin and Ronnie to thank for it. — Alan Maass, author, The Case for Socialism; editor, SocialistWorker.org Tortured by Blue is not a story about individual survival in the face of horrific circumstances. It is a story about the multitude of individuals (police, prosecutors, judges, elected officials to name a few), practices, and systems that looked the other way and knowingly ALLOWED for the police torture of men and women in Chicago to continue on for decades. With the turn of each page, my rage grew, and with it a commitment to making sure the truths Stanley Howard, Mark Clements, Marvin Reeves and Ronald Kitchen lifts up in their writings are shared widely and result in accountability and substantive change so no individual or family has to go through what the police torture survivors had to experience. —Cindy Eigler, director of policy and strategic initiatives, Chicago Torture Justice Center Swept under the rug for too long, the wrongful convictions and police abuses described in [Torture by Blue] are a very real part of the history of the city of Chicago. Studying that history is crucial to avoiding the mistakes of the past, and [the author’s] deserves considerable credit from pulling it all together. Well -researched and comprehensive in scope, [the author’s] book doses an excellent job of telling this important story. —Jon Lovey, civil rights attorney specializing in police misconduct
Download or read book Confessions of an Innocent Man written by William Sampson and published by McClelland & Stewart Limited. This book was released on 2005 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What was it that I did to survive? Where did those ideas come from? Where did I find the resolve to enact them? At the time of my release, I had no ready answers beyond that I did what seemed natural and necessary. In looking back, I realize that the peculiarities of my personality helped me to adopt strategies that allowed for the reclamation of my identity and my integrity while in the hands of barbarians. Yet what I did is neither remarkable nor courageous nor beyond the capabilities of any person that finds himself in similar circumstances. What I have come to believe is that there exists in all of us the potential to stand and fight and reclaim." — William Sampson On Sunday, December 17, 2000, Canadian engineer William Sampson stepped outside his house in Riyadh only to be hauled into a car and beaten by two Saudi men he didn’t know. Within an hour, he was incarcerated in one of the city’s most notorious jails. Within two months, he was tortured into a confession of responsibility for a wave of car bombings he did not commit. Sometime in that first year, he was sentenced to death in a secret trial. For two and a half years, Sampson was continually subjected to beatings and torture, convinced his death was just around the corner. Inept diplomacy failed him but human rights groups took up his cause and on August 8, 2003, he was finally freed in a controversial prisoner exchange. It wasn’t until February 2005 that Sampson’s name was officially cleared when a British inquest exonerated him of the crimes. Angry, intelligent, and compelling, Sampson places his personal story within the context of the geopolitics that engineered his fate, and in doing so has crafted a searing exposé of Western foreign policy in the Arab Middle East.
Download or read book Confessions of a Tortured Soul written by Kenneth Tamara and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-05-21 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Confessions" is a compilation of poems, essays and proses revealing a journey of a soul in search of respite from inner turmoil and torture. A life plagued by addictions and abuse, crying out and searching for inner solace and peace, and the journey it took to find it.
Download or read book The Proceedings Against the Templars in the British Isles written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In October 1307 all the brothers of the military religious Order of the Temple in France were arrested on the instructions of King Philip IV and charged with heresy. In November, Pope Clement V instructed King Edward II of England to do likewise. This volume provide the first full translation of the four surviving texts of the trial proceedings that followed in Britain and Ireland, complementing the edition published in volume 1. The trial of the Templars was the first major heresy trial in the British Isles, and the proceedings reveal the Episcopate's attempts to deal with this unprecedented situation, the varying procedures followed in different countries, and how testimonies were recorded and summarised for the Church Councils which eventually decided the fate of the Order of the Temple. The testimonies given during the trial contain a wealth of information about religious beliefs among the lay population of the British Isles (both the Templars and outsiders who gave evidence during the trial), national and international mobility of lay religious, the social function of the order of the Temple in the British Isles and its relations with society at large, and the organisation and operations of the Order of the Temple at a local, national and international level. Detailed introductions to each volume describe the manuscripts and how the material was compiled and arranged, and discuss the course of the proceedings and the value of the evidence they contain. Appendices in this volume also list the names of all the Templars mentioned during the proceedings, Templar houses and the locations of the proceedings in London.
Download or read book The Exclusionary Rule of Evidence written by Asst Prof Kuo-hsing Hsieh and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues the need for the establishment of an exclusionary rule of evidence in China as a means of protecting the people from police wrongdoing. In support of the argument and as a means of developing a suitable process, the author takes a comparative approach to the foundation and development of the exclusionary rule in the UK and the USA, whilst also exploring the issues that may arise in transferring the rule from one legal system to another.
