The Torture Machine

The Torture Machine
Author: Flint Taylor
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2019-03-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1608468968

With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s political machine, from aldermen to the mayor’s office. [TAYLOR’s BOOK] takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed—through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department’s “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.

The Torture Report

The Torture Report
Author: Larry Siems
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2012-01-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781935928638

Sometimes the truth is buried in front of us. That is the case with more than 140,000 government documents relating to abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces during the "war on terror," brought to light by Freedom of Information Act litigation. As the lead author of the ACLU's report on these documents, Larry Siems is in a unique position to chronicle who did what, to whom and when. This book, written with the pace and intensity of a thriller, serves as a tragic reminder of what happens when commitments to law, common sense, and human dignity are cast aside, when it becomes difficult to discern the difference between two groups intent on perpetrating extreme violence on their fellow human beings.Divided into three sections, The Torture Report presents a stunning array of eyewitness and first-person reportsby victims, perpetrators, dissenters, and investigatorsof the CIA's White House-orchestrated interrogations in illegal, secret prisons around the world; the Pentagon's "special projects," in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; plots real and imagined, and much more.

The Torture Doctors

The Torture Doctors
Author: Steven H. Miles MD
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2020-03-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1626167524

Torture doctors invent and oversee techniques to inflict pain and suffering without leaving scars. Their knowledge of the body and its breaking points and their credible authority over death certificates and medical records make them powerful and elusive perpetrators of the crime of torture. In The Torture Doctors, Steven H. Miles fearlessly explores who these physicians are, what they do, how they escape justice, and what can be done to hold them accountable. At least one hundred countries employ torture doctors, including both dictatorships and democracies. While torture doctors mostly act with impunity—protected by governments, medical associations, and licensing boards—Miles shows that a movement has begun to hold these doctors accountable and to return them to their proper role as promoters of health and human rights. Miles’s groundbreaking portrayal exposes the thinking and psychology of these doctors, and his investigation points to how the international human rights community and the medical community can come together to end these atrocities.

A Genealogy of the Torture Taboo

A Genealogy of the Torture Taboo
Author: Jamal Barnes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2017-04-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351977733

This book examines the historical genealogy of the torture taboo. The dissonance between the absolute prohibition against torture and its widespread violation raises important questions about the torture taboo in world politics. Does the torture taboo matter? Or are political realists correct in arguing that power politics rules? Barnes argues that despite the torture taboo’s violation, it still matters, and paradoxically, its strength can be seen by studying its violation. States hide, deny, re-define and outsource their torture, as well as torture without leaving marks to avoid being stigmatised as a norm violating state. Tracing a genealogy of the torture taboo from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century Barnes shows how the taboo has developed over time, and how violations have played an important role in that development. Through six historical and contemporary case studies, it is argued that the taboo’s humanitarian pressures do not cease when states violate the norm, but continue to shape actors in unexpected ways. Building upon the constructivist norm literature that has shown how norms shape state actions and interests, the book also widens our understanding of the complex role norm violations play in international society. Making a contribution to existing public debates on the use of torture in counter-terrorism policy, it will be of great use to scholars, postgraduates and practitioners in the fields of human rights, international relations theory (in particular constructivism), security studies and international law.

The Torture and Prisoner Abuse Debate

The Torture and Prisoner Abuse Debate
Author: Laura L. Finley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2008-07-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0313342938

Revelations about U.S. torture and prisoner abuse in blatant violation of the long-established and universally recognized Geneva Conventions have horrified most Americans. Nevertheless, it has been argued that the high stakes of the War on Terror have made the protections offered by the Conventions obsolete, or that the abuses are the work of a few rogue soldiers and officers. This book reaches past the headlines into the historical record to document POW torture and also domestic prisoner abuse dating well back in our history as well as government and military knowledge of and collusion in such ostensibly illegal and reprehensible acts. Is torture and prisoner abuse justified in the name of some greater good? As a society we shall have to decide. The historical record presented here can contribute much to an informed national discussion.

Liberal Democracies and the Torture of Their Citizens

Liberal Democracies and the Torture of Their Citizens
Author: Cynthia Banham
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2017-02-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1509906827

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.

The Torture Camp on Paradise Street

The Torture Camp on Paradise Street
Author: Stanislav Aseyev
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-01-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0674291107

In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Ukrainian journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner from 2015 to 2017 in a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This memoir recounts an endless ordeal of psychological and physical abuse, including torture and rape, inflicted upon the author and his fellow inmates over the course of nearly three years of illegal incarceration spent largely in the prison called Izoliatsiia (Isolation). Aseyev also reflects on how a human can survive such atrocities and reenter the world to share his story. Since February 2022, numerous cases of illegal detainment and extreme mistreatment have been reported in the Ukrainian towns and villages occupied by Russian forces during the full-scale invasion. These and other war crimes committed by Russian troops speak to the horrors wreaked upon Ukrainians forced to live in Russian-occupied zones. It is important to remember, however, that the torture and killing of Ukrainians by Russian security and military forces began long before 2022. Rendered deftly into English, Aseyev’s compelling account offers a critical insight into the operations of Russian forces in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

The Torture Letters

The Torture Letters
Author: Laurence Ralph
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2020-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022672980X

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.