The History of Torture

The History of Torture

Author: Brian Innes

Publisher: Amber Books Ltd

Published: 2012-07-18

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 190827395X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The History of Torture tells the complete story of torture, from its earliest uses right up to the present day, from the tools and techniques used, to the campaigns to abolish its use.


The History of Torture

The History of Torture

Author: Daniel P. Mannix

Publisher: eNet Press

Published:

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1618867512

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Torture has been an intrinsic part of the legal process in most cultures for centuries. Indeed, the violence we witness daily in our own society and recent revelations about the continued use of torture, seems proof that inflicting extreme mental or physical pain on an individual to achieve one's own ends is not a taboo practice buried in the past. This incomparable, extremely thorough book — told with a frightening and factual honesty — examines every aspect of torture: professional torturers, theories and techniques, the role of torture in history, moral implications, and the refinements brought to the practice of torture by individual fanatics, religious groups, the military, and, indeed, entire cultures. For such transgressions against society as adultery, heresy and espionage, from the primitive snake pit to the sophistication of brainwashing, there have been literally thousands of techniques devised to distort both the body and the mind in order to satisfy the sadistic needs of those who command, perform and witness human torture. At the time of its first publication (1964), The History of Torture was the most complete repository of information on the subject ever assembled in one volume.


The History Of Torture

The History Of Torture

Author: George Ryley Scott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-28

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1136191674

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published in 2005. Torture, an enduring and seemingly not declining aspect of man's relationship to his fellow man, is an enduring thread through human history. Whether it be practiced by primitive people, the ancient Greeks or the Catholic Church, whether it be ancient China, Japan, 1930's Germany, or Northern Ireland today, torture is alarmingly systematic and consistent in its methods. Impaling, burning, rack or wheel, mutilation, drawing and quartering, burning or hanging alive in chains. A very comprehensive and readable work.


Cruel Britannia

Cruel Britannia

Author: Ian Cobain

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9781846273346

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A award-winning book from an acclaimed investigative journalist, Cruel Britannia tells the hidden story of Britain's secretive and shameful record of torture, for the first time


Torture and State Violence in the United States

Torture and State Violence in the United States

Author: Robert M. Pallitto

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2011-11

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1421402491

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Organized around five broad thematic periods in American history--colonial America and the early republic; slavery and the frontier; imperialism, Jim Crow, and World Wars I and II; the Cold War, Vietnam, and police torture; and the war on terror--this annotated documentary history traces the low and high points of official attitudes toward state violence."--Page 4 of cover.


A History of Torture in Britain

A History of Torture in Britain

Author: Simon Webb

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2019-10-19

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 9781526751485

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

There is an ancient and quite baseless myth that the use of torture has never been legal in Britain. This old wives' tale arose because torture had been neither endorsed nor forbidden by either statute or common law. In other words; the law has, until the late twentieth century, never had anything to say on the subject. In fact, torture, inflicted both as punishment and as an aid to interrogation, has been a constant and recurring feature of British life; from the beginning of the country's recorded history, until well into the twentieth century. Even as late as 1976, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British Army was guilty of the systematic torture of suspected terrorists. In 'A History of Torture in Britain' Simon Webb traces the terrible story of the deliberate use of pain on prisoners in Britain and its overseas possessions. Beginning with the medieval trial by ordeal, which entailed carrying a red-hot iron bar in your bare hand for a certain distance, through to the stretching on the rack of political prisoners and the mutilation of those found guilty of sedition; the evidence clearly shows that Britain has relied heavily upon torture, both at home and abroad, for almost the whole of its history. This sweeping and authoritative account of a grisly and distasteful subject is likely to become the definitive history of the judicial infliction of pain in Britain and its Empire.


Civilizing Torture

Civilizing Torture

Author: W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0674244702

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


The Big Book of Pain

The Big Book of Pain

Author: Mark P. Donnelly

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780752459479

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For millennia, mankind has devised ingenious and diabolical means of inflicting pain on fellow human beings. This deplorable but seemingly universal trait has eaten away at mankind's very claim to civilisation.


The Torture Letters

The Torture Letters

Author: Laurence Ralph

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-01-15

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 022672980X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.


Torture and the Law of Proof

Torture and the Law of Proof

Author: John H. Langbein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-04-24

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0226922618

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Torture and the Law of Proof John H. Langbein explores the world of the thumbscrew and the rack, engines of torture authorized for investigating crime in European legal systems from medieval times until well into the eighteenth century. Drawing on juristic literature and legal records, Langbein's book, first published in 1977, remains the definitive account of how European legal systems became dependent on the use of torture in their routine criminal procedures, and how they eventually worked themselves free of it. The book has recently taken on an eerie relevance as a consequence of controversial American and British interrogation practices in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In a new introduction, Langbein contrasts the "new" law of torture with the older European law and offers some pointed lessons about the difficulty of reconciling coercion with accurate investigation. Embellished with fascinating illustrations of torture devices taken from an eighteenth-century criminal code, this crisply written account will engage all those interested in torture's remarkable grip on European legal history.