Torture and Impunity
Title | Torture and Impunity PDF eBook |
Author | Alfred W. McCoy |
Publisher | University of Wisconsin Pres |
Total Pages | 423 |
Release | 2012-08-24 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0299288536 |
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.
A Question of Torture
Title | A Question of Torture PDF eBook |
Author | Alfred McCoy |
Publisher | Metropolitan Books |
Total Pages | 324 |
Release | 2007-04-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1429900687 |
A startling exposé of the CIA's development and spread of psychological torture, from the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and beyond In this revelatory account of the CIA's secret, fifty-year effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy uncovers the deep, disturbing roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Far from aberrations, as the White House has claimed, A Question of Torture shows that these abuses are the product of a long-standing covert program of interrogation. Developed at the cost of billions of dollars, the CIA's method combined "sensory deprivation" and "self-inflicted pain" to create a revolutionary psychological approach—the first innovation in torture in centuries. The simple techniques—involving isolation, hooding, hours of standing, extremes of hot and cold, and manipulation of time—constitute an all-out assault on the victim's senses, destroying the basis of personal identity. McCoy follows the years of research—which, he reveals, compromised universities and the U.S. Army—and the method's dissemination, from Vietnam through Iran to Central America. He traces how after 9/11 torture became Washington's weapon of choice in both the CIA's global prisons and in "torture-friendly" countries to which detainees are dispatched. Finally McCoy argues that information extracted by coercion is worthless, making a case for the legal approach favored by the FBI. Scrupulously documented and grippingly told, A Question of Torture is a devastating indictment of inhumane practices that have spread throughout the intelligence system, damaging American's laws, military, and international standing.
Torture and Its Definition in International Law
Title | Torture and Its Definition in International Law PDF eBook |
Author | Metin Baolu |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 571 |
Release | 2017 |
Genre | Law |
ISBN | 0199374627 |
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.
Colonial Terror
Title | Colonial Terror PDF eBook |
Author | Deana Heath |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Total Pages | 256 |
Release | 2021-03-23 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0192646168 |
Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.
In Plain Sight
Title | In Plain Sight PDF eBook |
Author | Tyrell Haberkorn |
Publisher | University of Wisconsin Pres |
Total Pages | 373 |
Release | 2018-01-09 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0299314405 |
Following a 1932 coup d’état in Thailand that ended absolute monarchy and established a constitution, the Thai state that emerged has suppressed political dissent through detention, torture, forced reeducation, disappearances, assassinations, and massacres. In Plain Sight shows how these abuses, both hidden and occurring in public view, have become institutionalized through a chronic failure to hold perpetrators accountable. Tyrell Haberkorn’s deeply researched revisionist history of modern Thailand highlights the legal, political, and social mechanisms that have produced such impunity and documents continual and courageous challenges to state domination.
Mexico
Title | Mexico PDF eBook |
Author | Amnesty International |
Publisher | Amnesty International |
Total Pages | 68 |
Release | 1991 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN |
Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda
Title | Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda PDF eBook |
Author | Karen Engle |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 401 |
Release | 2016-12-15 |
Genre | Law |
ISBN | 110707987X |
This volume presents and critiques the distorted effects of the international human rights movement's focus on the fight against impunity.