Download or read book Understanding Torture written by J. Jeremy Wisnewski and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Torture surveys the massive literature surrounding torture, arguing that, once properly understood, there can be no defense of torture in any circumstances.
Download or read book Understanding Torture written by John Parry and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legal prohibitions against torture cannot prevent state violence
Download or read book Understanding Torture written by J. Jeremy Wisnewski and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite Victor Hugo's 19th-century proclamation that torture no longer exists, we still find it even now, even in those nations that claim to be paradigms of civility. Why is it that torture still exists in a world where it is routinely regarded as immoral? Is it possible to eliminate torture, and if so, how? What exactly does it mean to call something 'torture', and is it always morally reprehensible? Arguments in favour of torture abound, but in this important new book, J. Jeremy Wisnewski examines and explains the moral dimensions of this perennial practice, paying careful attention to what lessons torture can teach us about our own moral psychology. By systematically exposing the weaknesses of the dominant arguments for torture, drawing on resources in both analytic and continental philosophy and relevant empirical literature in psychology, Wisnewski aims to provide an over-arching account of torture: what it is, why it's wrong, and why even the most civilized people can nevertheless engage in it.
Download or read book Understanding Torture written by John Parry and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "John Parry's Understanding Torture is an important contribution to our understanding of how torture fits within the practices and beliefs of the modern state. His juxtaposition of the often indeterminate nature of the law of torture with the very specific state practices of torture is both startling and revealing." ---Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and author of Sacred Violence "Parry is effective in building, deploying, and supporting his argument . . . that the law does not provide effective protections against torture, but also that the law is in itself constitutive of a political order in which torture is employed to create---and to destroy or re-create---political identities.” ---Margaret Satterthwaite, Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Associate Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law "A beautifully crafted, convincingly argued book that does not shy away from addressing the legal and ethical complexities of torture in the modern world. In a field that all too often produces simple or superficial responses to what has become an increasingly challenging issue, Understanding Torture stands out as a sophisticated and intellectually responsible work." ---Ruth Miller, Associate Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Boston Prohibiting torture will not end it. In Understanding Torture, John T. Parry explains that torture is already a normal part of the state coercive apparatus. Torture is about dominating the victim for a variety of purposes, including public order; control of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; and--- critically---domination for the sake of domination. Seen in this way, Abu Ghraib sits on a continuum with contemporary police violence in U.S. cities; violent repression of racial minorities throughout U.S. history; and the exercise of power in a variety of political, social, and interpersonal contacts. Creating a separate category for an intentionally narrow set of practices labeled and banned as torture, Parry argues, serves to normalize and legitimate the remaining practices that are "not torture." Consequently, we must question the hope that law can play an important role in regulating state violence. No one who reads this book can fail to understand the centrality of torture in modern law, politics, and governance. John T. Parry is Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.
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 Torture and Its Definition in International Law written by Metin Baolu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an interdisciplinary approach to definition of torture by a group of prominent scholars of behavioral sciences, international law, human rights, and public health. It represents a first ever attempt to compare behavioral science and international law perspectives on definitional issues and promote a sound theory- and evidence-based understanding of torture.
Download or read book Unjustifiable Means written by Mark Fallon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book the government doesn’t want you to read. President Trump wants to bring back torture. This is why he’s wrong. In his more than thirty years as an NCIS special agent and counterintelligence officer, Mark Fallon has investigated some of the most significant terrorist operations in US history, including the first bombing of the World Trade Center and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. He knew well how to bring criminals to justice, all the while upholding the Constitution. But in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it was clear that America was dealing with a new kind of enemy. Soon after the attacks, Fallon was named Deputy Commander of the newly formed Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF), created to probe the al-Qaeda terrorist network and bring suspected terrorists to trial. Fallon was determined to do the job the right way, but with the opening of Guantanamo Bay and the arrival of its detainees, he witnessed a shadowy dark side of the intelligence community that emerged, peddling a snake-oil they called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In Unjustifiable Means, Fallon reveals this dark side of the United States government, which threw our own laws and international covenants aside to become a nation that tortured—sanctioned by the highest-ranking members of the Bush Administration, the Army, and the CIA, many of whom still hold government positions, although none have been held accountable. Until now. Follow along as Fallon pieces together how this shadowy group incrementally—and secretly—loosened the reins on interrogation techniques at Gitmo and later, Abu-Ghraib, and black sites around the world. He recounts how key psychologists disturbingly violated human rights and adopted harsh practices to fit the Bush administration’s objectives even though such tactics proved ineffective, counterproductive, and damaging to our own national security. Fallon untangles the powerful decisions the administration’s legal team—the Bush “War Counsel”—used to provide the cover needed to make torture the modus operandi of the United States government. As Fallon says, “You could clearly see it coming, you could wave your arms and yell, but there wasn’t a damn thing you could do to stop it.” Unjustifiable Means is hard-hitting, raw, and explosive, and forces the spotlight back on to how America lost its way. Fallon also exposes those responsible for using torture under the guise of national security, as well as those heroes who risked it all to oppose the program. By casting a defining light on one of America’s darkest periods, Mark Fallon weaves a cautionary tale for those who wield the power to reinstate torture.
Download or read book The United Nations Convention Against Torture and Its Optional Protocol written by Manfred Nowak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 1361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Published with the support of Austrian Science Fund (FWF): PUB 644-G."
Download or read book Torture Psychoanalysis and Human Rights written by Monica Luci and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights contributes to the development of that field of study called ‘psycho-social’ that is presently more and more committed to providing understanding of social phenomena, making use of the explicative perspective of psychoanalysis. The book seeks to develop a concise and integrated framework of understanding of torture as a socio-political phenomenon based on psychoanalytic thinking, through which different dimensions of the subject of study become more comprehensible. Monica Luci argues that torture performs a covert emotional function in society. In order to identify what this function might be, a profile of ‘torturous societies’ and the main psychological dynamics of social actors involved – torturers, victims, and bystanders – are drawn from literature. Accordingly, a wide-ranging description of the phenomenology of torture is provided, detecting an inclusive and recurring pattern of key elements. Relying on psychoanalytic concepts derived from different theoretical traditions, including British object relations theories, American relational psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, the study provides an advanced line of conceptual research, shaping a model, whose aim is tograsp the deep meaning of key intrapsychic, interpersonal and group dynamics involved in torture. Once a sufficiently coherent understanding has been reached, Luci proposes using it as a groundwork tool in the human rights field to re-think the best strategies of prevention and recovery from post-torture psychological and social suffering. The book initiates a dialogue between psychoanalysis and human rights, showing that the proposed psychoanalytic understanding is a viable conceptualisation for expanding thinking of crucial issues regarding torture, which might be relevant to human rights and legal doctrine, such as the responsibility of perpetrators, the reparation of victims and the question of ‘truth’. Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights is the first book to build a psychoanalytic theory of torture from which psychological, social and legal reflections, as well as practical aspects of treatment, can be mutually derived and understood. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and Jungians, as well as scholars of politics, social work and justice, and human rights and postgraduate students studying across these fields.
Download or read book Anatomy of Torture written by Ron E. Hassner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture, Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide. The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every confession in the torture chamber. Their transcripts reveal that Inquisitors used torture deliberately and meticulously, unlike the rash, improvised methods used by the United States after 9/11. In their relentless pursuit of underground Jewish communities in Spain and Mexico, the Inquisition tortured in cold blood. But they treated any information extracted with caution: torture was used to test information provided through other means, not to uncover startling new evidence. Hassner's findings in Anatomy of Torture have important implications for ongoing torture debates. Rather than insist that torture is ineffective, torture critics should focus their attention on the morality of torture. If torture is evil, its efficacy is irrelevant. At the same time, torture defenders cannot advocate for torture as a counterterrorist "quick fix": torture has never located, nor will ever locate, the hypothetical "ticking bomb" that is frequently invoked to justify brutality in the name of security.
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 Tortured Logic written by Joseph K. Young and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experts in the intelligence community say that torture is ineffective. Yet much of the public appears unconvinced: surveys show that nearly half of Americans think that torture can be acceptable for counterterrorism purposes. Why do people persist in supporting torture—and can they be persuaded to change their minds? In Tortured Logic, Erin M. Kearns and Joseph K. Young draw upon a novel series of group experiments to understand how and why the average citizen might come to support the use of torture techniques. They find evidence that when torture is depicted as effective in the media, people are more likely to approve of it. Their analysis weighs variables such as the ethnicity of the interrogator and the suspect; the salience of one’s own mortality; and framing by experts. Kearns and Young also examine who changes their opinions about torture and how, demonstrating that only some individuals have fixed views while others have more malleable beliefs. They argue that efforts to reduce support for torture should focus on convincing those with fluid views that torture is ineffective. The book features interviews with experienced interrogators and professionals working in the field to contextualize its findings. Bringing empirical rigor to a fraught topic, Tortured Logic has important implications for understanding public perceptions of counterterrorism strategy.
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 The Prevention of Torture written by Danielle Celermajer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving past theoretical critiques of human rights, this book considers how we might translate situational analyses of torture into effective strategies for preventing it.
Download or read book Civilizing Torture written by W. Fitzhugh Brundage and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2018-11-12 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 Why Terrorism Works written by Alan M. Dershowitz and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's most distinguished defenders of civil liberties presents measures that will prevent terrorism and still uphold our democratic values The greatest danger facing the world today, says Alan M. Dershowitz, comes from religiously inspired, state sponsored terrorist groups that seek to develop weapons of mass destruction for use against civilian targets. In his newest book, Dershowitz argues passionately and persuasively that global terrorism is a phenomenon largely of our own making and that we must and can take steps to reduce the frequency and severity of terrorist acts. Analyzing recent acts of terrorism and our reaction to them, Dershowitz explains that terrorism is successful when the international community gives in to the demands of terrorists--or even tries to understand and eliminate the "root causes" of terrorism. He discusses extreme approaches to wiping out international terrorism that would work if we were not constrained by legal, moral, and humanitarian considerations. And then, given that we do operate under such constraints, he offers a series of proposals that would effectively reduce the frequency and severity of international terrorism by striking a balance between security and liberty.
Download or read book Torture and Impunity written by Alfred W. McCoy and published by . This book was released on 2012-08-24 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans have condemned the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human rights. But the United States has done almost nothing to prosecute past abuses or prevent future violations. Tracing this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, historian Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government. During the Cold War, McCoy argues, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to weaken a subject’s resistance to interrogation. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the CIA revived these harsh methods, while U.S. media was flooded with seductive images that normalized torture for many Americans. Ten years later, the U.S. had failed to punish the perpetrators or the powerful who commanded them, and continued to exploit intelligence extracted under torture by surrogates from Somalia to Afghanistan. Although Washington has publicly distanced itself from torture, disturbing images from the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are seared into human memory, doing lasting damage to America’s moral authority as a world leader.
