Pinochet
Pinochet

Author: Hugh O'Shaughnessy

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2000-03

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780814762011

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Near midnight on October 16, 1998, officers of Scotland Yard entered the London hospital room of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and arrested him on charges of torturing and murdering Spanish citizens. The arrest sent shockwaves around the world, delighting his detractors and the families of his regime's victims, and dismaying his supporters, including Margaret Thatcher. It marked the first time a former head of state had been detained outside his own country on charges of crimes against humanity, and thus signaled a clear warning to former dictators and heads of abusive regimes. Through interviews, eyewitness accounts, and new sources, veteran journalist Hugh O'Shaughnessy here sifts through the General's personal life, rise to power, and arrest and internment. In clear, unforgiving prose, Pinochet: The Politics of Torture tells the riveting story of legal intrigue behind the search for justice.

Talking About Torture
Talking About Torture

Author: Jared Del Rosso

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-06-09

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0231539495

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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.

Political Torture in Popular Culture
Political Torture in Popular Culture

Author: Alex Adams

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-17

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1317289382

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Political Torture in Popular Culture argues that the literary, filmic, and popular cultural representation of political torture has been one of the defining dimensions of the torture debate that has taken place in the course of the post-9/11 global war on terrorism. The book argues that cultural representations provide a vital arena in which political meaning is generated, negotiated, and contested. Adams explores whether liberal democracies can ever legitimately perpetrate torture, contrasting assertions that torture can function as a legitimate counterterrorism measure with human rights-based arguments that torture is never morally permissible. He examines the philosophical foundations of pro- and anti-torture positions, looking at their manifestations in a range of literary, filmic and popular cultural texts, and assesses the material effects of these representations. Literary novels, televisual texts, films, and critical theoretical discourse are all covered, focusing on the ways that aesthetic and textual strategies are mobilised to create specific political effects. This book is the first sustained analysis of the torture debate and the role that cultural narratives and representations play within it. It will be of great use to scholars interested in the emerging canon of post-9/11 cultural texts about torture, as well as scholars and students working in politics, history, geography, human rights, international relations, and terrorism studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and film studies.

Torture and Eucharist
Torture and Eucharist

Author: William T. Cavanaugh

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1998-12-07

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780631211990

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In this engrossing analysis, Cavanaugh contends that the Eucharist is the Church's response to the use of torture as a social discipline.

Getting Away with Torture
Getting Away with Torture

Author: Christopher H. Pyle

Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1597976210

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Follows the paper trail of torture memos that led to abuses at Guantanámo, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq.

Torture and Impunity
Torture and Impunity

Author: Alfred W. McCoy

Publisher:

Published: 2012-08-24

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13:

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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.

Liberal Democracies and the Torture of Their Citizens
Liberal Democracies and the Torture of Their Citizens

Author: Cynthia Banham

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-02-09

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1509906827

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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.

Understanding Torture
Understanding Torture

Author: John Parry

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2010-02-16

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 047205077X

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Legal prohibitions against torture cannot prevent state violence

The Torture Debate in America
The Torture Debate in America

Author: Karen J. Greenberg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-11-21

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 9781139447034

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As a result of the work assembling the documents, memoranda, and reports that constitute the material in The Torture Papers the question of the rationale behind the Bush administration's decision to condone the use of coercive interrogation techniques in the interrogation of detainees suspected of terrorist connections was raised. The condoned use of torture in any society is questionable but its use by the United States, a liberal democracy that champions human rights and is a party to international conventions forbidding torture, has sparked an intense debate within America. The Torture Debate in America captures these arguments with essays from individuals in different discipines. This volume is divided into two sections with essays covering all sides of the argument from those who embrace absolute prohibition of torture to those who see it as a viable option in the war on terror and with documents complementing the essays.

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

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"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.