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.
Bearing Witness Gautier, Andres; Scalmati, Anna Sabatini
2010, 20180508
eBook
'In their discussion of torture, the contributors to this book write of what its victims cannot put into words and the work that has to be done with them to that end. Working with a victim's account ...of a traumatic experience goes much further than any debriefing technique would have us believe - above all, victims need someone to listen carefully to what they have to say; that person will be the first to offer a refuge for the pain of those who have no internal "shelter" of their own. The authors go on to discuss the kind of mental processing that can free victims from their unspeakable trauma, a trauma that has no framework in time nor words with which to express it.Under the skilful editorship of Andres Gautier and Anna Sabatini, this book asks of both psychoanalysts and politicians a question that goes right to the heart of their "impossible professions".- Rene Kaes, from the Foreword
Evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and harsh interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay beg the question: has the war on terror forced liberal democracies to rethink their policies and ...laws against torture? Transnational Torture focuses on the legal and political discourses on torture in India and the United States--two common-law based constitutional democracies--to theorize the relationship between law, violence, and state power in liberal democracies.Analyzing about one hundred landmark Supreme Court cases on torture in India and the United States, memos and popular imagery of torture, Jinee Lokaneeta compellingly demonstrates that even before recent debates on the use of torture in the war on terror, the laws of interrogation were much more ambivalent about the infliction of excess pain and suffering than most political and legal theorists have acknowledged. Rather than viewing the recent policies on interrogation as anomalous or exceptional, Lokaneeta effectively argues that efforts to accommodate excess violence--a constantly negotiated process--are long standing features of routine interrogations in both the United States and India, concluding that the infliction of excess violence is more central to democratic governance than is acknowledged in western jurisprudence.
Hikmet Karčić. 2022. Torture, Humiliate, Kill. Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States: University of Michigan Press. 277 pp., ISBN 978-0- 472-90271-2 (Open Access)
Torture and democracy Rejali, Darius
2007., 20090608, 2009, 2007, 2008-01-01
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
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.
Este artigo analisa a mobilização do conceito de dignidade da pessoa humana como vedação de submissão à tortura aplicada à questão do aborto na Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental no ...54. Identifico que a organização da demanda em torno ao princípio da dignidade permitiu um conflito agonístico entre os constitucionalismos católico e secular, o qual foi estabilizado na procedência da ação por uma interpretação dos preceitos baseada em humanismo secular sensível ao gênero. Palavras-chave: Aborto; Dignidade da pessoa humana; Tortura. This article analyzes the mobilization of the concept of human dignity as prohibition against torture applied to the abortion rights debate in the Claim of Non-Compliance with Fundamental Precept no 54. I identify that the organization of the case around the principle of human dignity allowed for an agonistic conflict between Catholic and secular constitutionalisms, which was stabilized in the ruling by an interpretation of the precepts based on gender-sensitive secular humanism. Keywords: Abortion; Human dignity; Torture.
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