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Author: Renata Meirelles Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351135651 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
State Violence, Torture, and Political Prisoners discusses the activities of Amnesty International during the period of Brazil’s dictatorship (1964–1985). During the dictatorship, Amnesty assisted political prisoners who were submitted to torture and helped to publicise charges of torture against agents of the military regime’s repressive apparatus. Through a specific examination of Amnesty’s work with Brazilian political prisoners, this book explores how Amnesty adapted its organisational principles – such as non-violence and the focus on individual cases – during this time. In 1967 Amnesty experienced a severe internal crisis which prompted the organisation to make structural changes. These changes enabled it to expand its activities beyond Europe to Latin America, including Brazil. This book examines one of Amnesty International’s first major campaigns against torture and the impact this had on the organisation’s development of a new agenda. Bringing a critical and historical perspective on Amnesty’s work, the book contributes to the debate on the role of human rights organisations in addressing human rights abuses worldwide. It makes a significant contribution to international research on state crime, human rights, and torture.
Author: Renata Meirelles Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351135651 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 180
Book Description
State Violence, Torture, and Political Prisoners discusses the activities of Amnesty International during the period of Brazil’s dictatorship (1964–1985). During the dictatorship, Amnesty assisted political prisoners who were submitted to torture and helped to publicise charges of torture against agents of the military regime’s repressive apparatus. Through a specific examination of Amnesty’s work with Brazilian political prisoners, this book explores how Amnesty adapted its organisational principles – such as non-violence and the focus on individual cases – during this time. In 1967 Amnesty experienced a severe internal crisis which prompted the organisation to make structural changes. These changes enabled it to expand its activities beyond Europe to Latin America, including Brazil. This book examines one of Amnesty International’s first major campaigns against torture and the impact this had on the organisation’s development of a new agenda. Bringing a critical and historical perspective on Amnesty’s work, the book contributes to the debate on the role of human rights organisations in addressing human rights abuses worldwide. It makes a significant contribution to international research on state crime, human rights, and torture.
Author: Jared Del Rosso Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231539495 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
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.
Author: James N. Green Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822391783 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 470
Book Description
In 1964, Brazil’s democratically elected, left-wing government was ousted in a coup and replaced by a military junta. The Johnson administration quickly recognized the new government. The U.S. press and members of Congress were nearly unanimous in their support of the “revolution” and the coup leaders’ anticommunist agenda. Few Americans were aware of the human rights abuses perpetrated by Brazil’s new regime. By 1969, a small group of academics, clergy, Brazilian exiles, and political activists had begun to educate the American public about the violent repression in Brazil and mobilize opposition to the dictatorship. By 1974, most informed political activists in the United States associated the Brazilian government with its torture chambers. In We Cannot Remain Silent, James N. Green analyzes the U.S. grassroots activities against torture in Brazil, and the ways those efforts helped to create a new discourse about human-rights violations in Latin America. He explains how the campaign against Brazil’s dictatorship laid the groundwork for subsequent U.S. movements against human rights abuses in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, and Central America. Green interviewed many of the activists who educated journalists, government officials, and the public about the abuses taking place under the Brazilian dictatorship. Drawing on those interviews and archival research from Brazil and the United States, he describes the creation of a network of activists with international connections, the documentation of systematic torture and repression, and the cultivation of Congressional allies and the press. Those efforts helped to expose the terror of the dictatorship and undermine U.S. support for the regime. Against the background of the political and social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, Green tells the story of a decentralized, international grassroots movement that effectively challenged U.S. foreign policy.
Author: Abeer Baker Publisher: Pluto Press ISBN: 9780745330211 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Palestinian prisoners charged with security-related offences are immediately taken as a threat to Israel's security. They are seen as potential, if not actual, suicide bombers. This stereotype ignores the political nature of the Palestinian prisoners' actions and their desire for liberty. By highlighting the various images of Palestinian prisoners in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Abeer Baker and Anat Matar chart their changing fortunes. Essays written by prisoners, ex-prisoners, Human rights defenders, lawyers and academic researchers analyze the political nature of imprisonment and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners. These contributions deal with the prisoners' status within Palestinian society, the conditions of their imprisonment and various legal procedures used by the Israeli military courts in order to criminalize and de-politicize them. Also addressed are Israel's breaches of international treaties in its treatment of the Palestinian prisoners, practices of torture and solitary confinement, exchange deals and prospects for release. This is a unique intervention within Middle East studies that will inspire those working in human rights, international law and the peace process.
Author: Angela Y. Davis Publisher: Seven Stories Press ISBN: 1609801032 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 138
Book Description
Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners. Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.
Author: Susan Rosenberg Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp. ISBN: 0806535008 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
On a November night in 1984, Susan Rosenberg sat in the passenger seat of a U-Haul as it swerved along the New Jersey Turnpike. At the wheel was a fellow political activist. In the back were 740 pounds of dynamite and assorted guns. That night I still believed with all my heart that what Che Guevara had said about revolutionaries being motivated by love was true. I also believed that our government ruled the world by force and that it was necessary to oppose it with force. Raised on New York City's Upper West Side, Rosenberg had been politically active since high school, involved in the black liberation movement and protesting repressive U.S. policies around the world and here at home. At twenty-nine, she was on the FBI's Most Wanted list. While unloading the U-Haul at a storage facility, Rosenberg was arrested and sentenced to an unprecedented 58 years for possession of weapons and explosives. I could not see the long distance I had traveled from my commitment to justice and equality to stockpiling guns and dynamite. Seeing that would take years. Rosenberg served sixteen years in some of the worst maximum-security prisons in the United States before being pardoned by President Clinton as he left office in 2001. Now, in a story that is both a powerful memoir and a profound indictment of the U.S. prison system, Rosenberg recounts her journey from the impassioned idealism of the 1960s to life as a political prisoner in her own country, subjected to dehumanizing treatment, yet touched by moments of grace and solidarity. Candid and eloquent, An American Radical reveals the woman behind the controversy--and reflects America's turbulent coming-of-age over the past half century.
Author: Darius Rejali Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400830877 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 865
Book Description
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. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.
Author: Jinee Lokaneeta Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814752802 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
"Transnational Torture by Jinee Lokaneeta reviewed with Prachi Patankar" on the blog Kafila. Evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo 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.
Author: Shahla Talebi Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804775818 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 265
Book Description
"Opening the enormous metal gate, the guard suddenly took away my blindfold and asked me, tauntingly, if I would recognize my parents. With my eyes hurting from the strange light and anger in my voice, I assured him that I would. Suddenly I was pushed through the gate and the door was slammed behind me. After more than eight years, here I was, finally, out of jail . . . ." In this haunting account, Shahla Talebi remembers her years as a political prisoner in Iran. Talebi, along with her husband, was imprisoned for nearly a decade and tortured, first under the Shah and later by the Islamic Republic. Writing about her own suffering and survival and sharing the stories of her fellow inmates, she details the painful reality of prison life and offers an intimate look at a critical period of social and political transformation in Iran. Somehow through it all—through resistance and resolute hope, passion and creativity—Talebi shows how one survives. Reflecting now on experiences past, she stays true to her memories, honoring the love of her husband and friends lost in these events, to relate how people can hold to moments of love, resilience, and friendship over the dark forces of torture, violence, and hatred. At once deeply personal yet clearly political, part memoir and part meditation, this work brings to heartbreaking clarity how deeply rooted torture and violence can be in our society. More than a passing judgment of guilt on a monolithic "Islamic State," Talebi's writing asks us to reconsider our own responses to both contemporary debates of interrogation techniques and government responsibility and, more simply, to basic acts of cruelty in daily life. She offers a lasting call to us all. "The art of living in prison becomes possible through imagining life in the very presence of death and observing death in the very existence of life. It is living life so vitally and so fully that you are willing, if necessary, to let that very life go, as one would shed chains on the legs. It is embracing, and flying on the wings of death as though it is the bird of freedom."
Author: Renata Meirelles
Author: Renata Meirelles
Author: Jared Del Rosso
Author: James N. Green
Author: Abeer Baker
Author: Angela Y. Davis
Author: Susan Rosenberg
Author: Darius Rejali
Author: Jinee Lokaneeta
Author: Shahla Talebi
Author: Patrick William Kelly