Download or read book Torture Democracy and Technology written by Darius REJALI and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Torture and Democracy written by Darius Rejali and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.
Download or read book Torture and Democracy written by Darius M. Rejali and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 892 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.
Download or read book Abolition Democracy written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners. Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.
Download or read book Liberal Democracies and the Torture of Their Citizens written by Cynthia Banham and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses and compares how the USA's liberal allies responded to the use of torture against their citizens after 9/11. Did they resist, tolerate or support the Bush Administration's policies concerning the mistreatment of detainees when their own citizens were implicated and what were the reasons for their actions? Australia, the UK and Canada are liberal democracies sharing similar political cultures, values and alliances with America; yet they behaved differently when their citizens, caught up in the War on Terror, were tortured. How states responded to citizens' human rights claims and predicaments was shaped, in part, by demands for accountability placed on the executive government by domestic actors. This book argues that civil society actors, in particular, were influenced by nuanced differences in their national political and legal contexts that enabled or constrained human rights activism. It maps the conditions under which individuals and groups were more or less likely to become engaged when fellow citizens were tortured, focusing on national rights culture, the domestic legal and political human rights framework, and political opportunities.
Download or read book Torture written by Shampa Biswas and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The counterterrorism policies following September 11, 2001, brought the definition and legitimacy of torture to the forefront of political, military, and public debates. This timely volume explores the question of torture through multiple lenses by situating it within systems of belief, social networks of power, and ideological worldviews. Individual essays examine the boundaries of what is deemed legitimate political violence for the sake of state security, the immediate and long-term effects of torture on human and social bodies, the visual and artistic representations of torture, how certain people are dehumanized to make it acceptable to torture them, and how we understand complicity in and the ethical boundaries of torture.
Download or read book Deterring Democracy written by Noam Chomsky and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 1992-04-06 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From World War II until the 1980s, the United States reigned supreme as both the economic and the military leader of the world. The major shifts in global politics that came about with the dismantling of the Eastern bloc have left the United States unchallenged as the preeminent military power, but American economic might has declined drastically in the face of competition, first from Germany and Japan ad more recently from newly prosperous countries elsewhere. In Deterring Democracy, the impassioned dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky points to the potentially catastrophic consequences of this new imbalance. Chomsky reveals a world in which the United States exploits its advantage ruthlessly to enforce its national interests--and in the process destroys weaker nations. The new world order (in which the New World give the orders) has arrived.
Download or read book Attention Deficit Democracy written by James Bovard and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A lively attack on politicians, voters and government. Bovard's indictment of an ineffective but ever-expanding federal government would make any libertarian proud." --New York Post Does the people's need to believe in the president trump their duty to understand, to think critically, and demand truth? Have Americans been conditioned to ignore political frauds and believe the lies perpetuated by campaign ads? James Bovard diagnoses a national malady called "Attention Deficit Democracy," characterized by a citizenry that seems to be paying less attention to facts, and is less capable of judging when their rights and liberties are under attack. Bovard's careful research combined with his characteristically caustic style will give "ADD" a whole new meaning that pundits, politicians, and we the people will find hard to ignore.
Download or read book Hurt written by Kristian Williams and published by Microcosm Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-29 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hurt is Portland activist Kristian Williams' collection of articles and interviews on the history, psychology, and current state of torture in democratic societies. Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue and American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, has pulled together a vast and comprehensive resource on this abominable act. Articles include David Cunningham's “Prisons, Torture, and Imperialism,” a piece on the anarchist perspective taken from comments at the 2008 Anarchist Bookfair in San Francisco, and a great essay on writing about torture, among many others. This sober 64-page document is a heavy piece of work—dark, informative, and oft times harrowing. But it's also about working hard to intact change. As says Williams in the Gyozo Nehez interview, “At the outset, I think it's more important to have a sense of hope, that things can be different and through our actions we can contribute to that change. The joy comes later, from struggle itself as much as from victory.” Hurt is a how-to manual on fighting and understanding torture—a piece of the struggle itself.
Download or read book On War and Democracy written by Christopher Kutz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : war, politics, democracy -- Democratic security -- Citizens and soldiers : the difference uniforms make -- A modest case for symmetry : are soldiers morally equal? -- Leaders and the gambles of war : against political luck -- War, democracy, and Secrecy : secret law -- Must a democracy be ruthless? : torture and existential politics -- Humanitarian intervention and the new democratic holy wars -- Drones and democracy -- Democracy and the death of norms -- Democratic states in victory : vae victis? -- Looking backward : democratic transitions and the choice of justice.
Download or read book Torture And Modernity written by Darius M Rejali and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does the practice of torture presuppose about human beings and human society? How does one explain a society in which institutional torture persists despite massive changes in government and class structure? What, indeed, are the social foundations of modern torture? In Culture and Modernity, Darius M. Rejali investigates torture in Iran in order to understand and critically reconsider the politics and psychology of modern torture. In a world in which one out of every three governments uses torture, Rejali points to a common past, one shared by Iranians and non-Iranians alike, that supports this practice.“My aim,” Rejali writes, “is to use the study of torture, and of punishment more generally, to unearth deep and important assumptions about society, history, politics, and the ‘good life' that I believe underpin the life of a torturer.”Exploring the four principle explanations of modern torture—those offered by human rights activists, modernization theorists, state terrorist theorists such as Noam Chomsky, and post-structuralists, especially Michel Foucault—Rejali asks, “Do the accounts of political violence that we have developed over the past century have any real… explanatory or even moral significance… in today's world, or are they just consolations in the face of events we cannot fully understand?” His answers lead him to reconsider how Middle Eastern and European history are written and move him to question cherished assumptions about state formation, modernization, and postmodernism. Torture and Modernity is a deeply unsettling book—it contains not only graphic verbal passages, but an extensive photographic essay—yet it is intended to serve as a guide to rethinking current attitudes and reshaping political policies. How people are punished necessarily invokes conceptions of what human beings are and what they might become. A work such as this offers an understanding of what it means to “become modern,” and it is only when this notion of modernity is made manifest and analyzed that one can firmly grasp the prospects for a world without torture.
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 Getting Away with Torture written by Christopher H. Pyle and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Follows the paper trail of torture memos that led to abuses at Guantanámo, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq.
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 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 Torture and Truth written by Mark Danner and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2004-10-31 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the torture photographs in color and the full texts of the secret administration memos on torture and the investigative reports on the abuses at Abu Ghraib. In the spring of 2004, graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison flashed around the world, provoking outraged debate. Did they depict the rogue behavior of "a few bad apples"? Or did they in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the "war on terror"? The images are shocking, but they do not tell the whole story. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents but the result of a chain of deliberate decisions and failures of command. To understand how "Hooded Man" and "Leashed Man" could have happened, Mark Danner turns to the documents that are collected for the first time in this book. These documents include secret government memos, some never before published, that portray a fierce argument within the Bush administration over whether al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and how far the US could go in interrogating them. There are also official reports on abuses at Abu Ghraib by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by US Army investigators, and by an independent panel chaired by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger. In sifting this evidence, Danner traces the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guant‡namo "migrated" to Iraq as resistance to the US occupation grew and US casualties mounted. Yet as Mark Danner writes, the real scandal here is political: it "is not about revelation or disclosure but about the failure, once wrongdoing is disclosed, of politicians, officials, the press, and, ultimately, citizens to act." For once we know the story the photos and documents tell, we are left with the questions they pose for our democratic society: Does fighting a "new kind of war" on terror justify torture? Who will we hold responsible for deciding to pursue such a policy, and what will be the moral and political costs to the country?
Download or read book The Despot s Accomplice written by Brian Paul Klaas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Klaas of the London School of Economics believes in the transformative power of democracy. In this comprehensive book, he offers prescriptions for Western powers seeking to spread political freedom and critiques many of the halfhearted pro-democracy efforts of recent decades. The United States' recent misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan chastened many who once espoused nation-building. But Klaas argues ceasing to promote democracy is a mistake. In addition to offering insights and examples gleaned from his global travels to investigate pseudo-democracies, Klaas also explores America itself, taking the US tradition of gerrymandering to task. At times, Klaas's crusade seems a bit too idealistic, but, ultimately, he makes a passionate and persuasive case for trying to expand democracy's shrinking reach.
