Author: Michael Keller Publisher: iUniverse ISBN: 193527807X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 189
Book Description
Michael Keller was once a software executive from Florida. Then came September 11, 2001. A few weeks after the al-Qaeda attacks on America, he joined the Army National Guard and was deployed to Iraq in November of 2005. In this revealing collection of e-mails and photographs, Keller shares his first-hand experiences in the War on Terror. Discover how it feels to man a gun-turret during convoy operations through the Highway of Death, what its like to guard the detainees at Torture Central, and what goes on in a soldiers mind during the moment he decides whether or not to kill someone. But at the heart of Torture Central is Kellers frustration at being assigned to the prison at Abu Ghraib without any training and with orders to torture detainees and ignore the Geneva Convention. His candid accounts illuminate his struggle to end the atrocities despite threats of punishment by superior officers. Shockingly, this mistreatment happened a year after the infamous abuse photos were published, following numerous investigations and public promises stating that the situation had been corrected. Thought-provoking and full of chilling detail, Kellers vivid look at Operation Iraqi Freedom is a must-read for all Americans.
Author: Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Publisher: Melville House ISBN: 1612198473 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 820
Book Description
The study edition of book the Los Angeles Times called, "The most extensive review of U.S. intelligence-gathering tactics in generations." This is the complete Executive Summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the CIA's interrogation and detention programs -- a.k.a., The Torture Report. Based on over six million pages of secret CIA documents, the report details a covert program of secret prisons, prisoner deaths, interrogation practices, and cooperation with other foreign and domestic agencies, as well as the CIA's efforts to hide the details of the program from the White House, the Department of Justice, the Congress, and the American people. Over five years in the making, it is presented here exactly as redacted and released by the United States government on December 9, 2014, with an introduction by Daniel J. Jones, who led the Senate investigation. This special edition includes: • Large, easy-to-read format. • Almost 3,000 notes formatted as footnotes, exactly as they appeared in the original report. This allows readers to see obscured or clarifying details as they read the main text. • An introduction by Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones who led the investigation and wrote the report for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a forward by the head of that committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Author: Ulrich Lehner Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers ISBN: 1625640404 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 119
Book Description
"Following the Council of Trent (1545-1563), Catholic religious orders underwent substantial reform. Nevertheless, on occasion monks and nuns had to be disciplined and--if they had committed a crime--punished. Consequently, many religious orders relied on sophisticated criminal law traditions that included torture, physical punishment, and prison sentences. Ulrich L. Lehner provides for the first time an overview of how monasteries in central Europe prosecuted crime and punished their members, and thus introduces a host of new questions for anyone interested in state-church relations, gender questions, the history of violence, or the development of modern monasticism."
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: Larry Siems Publisher: ISBN: 9781935928638 Category : Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
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.
Author: Alfred McCoy Publisher: Metropolitan Books ISBN: 1429900687 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
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.
Author: Shane O'Mara Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674743903 Category : Family & Relationships Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
Torture is banned because it is cruel and inhumane. But as Shane O’Mara writes in this account of the human brain under stress, another reason torture should never be condoned is because it does not work the way torturers assume it does. In countless films and TV shows such as Homeland and 24, torture is portrayed as a harsh necessity. If cruelty can extract secrets that will save lives, so be it. CIA officers and others conducted torture using precisely this justification. But does torture accomplish what its defenders say it does? For ethical reasons, there are no scientific studies of torture. But neuroscientists know a lot about how the brain reacts to fear, extreme temperatures, starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, and immersion in freezing water, all tools of the torturer’s trade. These stressors create problems for memory, mood, and thinking, and sufferers predictably produce information that is deeply unreliable—and, for intelligence purposes, even counterproductive. As O’Mara guides us through the neuroscience of suffering, he reveals the brain to be much more complex than the brute calculations of torturers have allowed, and he points the way to a humane approach to interrogation, founded in the science of brain and behavior. Torture may be effective in forcing confessions, as in Stalin’s Russia. But if we want information that we can depend on to save lives, O’Mara writes, our model should be Napoleon: “It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.”
Author: Alfred W. McCoy Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres ISBN: 0299288536 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 423
Book Description
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.
Author: John W. Schiemann Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0190262362 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 331
Book Description
Is interrogational torture effective? What do we mean by "effective"? How brutal can torture get and be considered justifiable? In this book, John Schiemann adopts game theory in an attempt to answer these questions, walking the reader through the logic of interrogational torture - and finding that it is far more brutal than proponents believe.
Author: Hilary Neroni Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231539142 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
Considering representations of torture in such television series as 24, Alias, and Homeland; the documentaries Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), and Standard Operating Procedure (2008); and "torture porn" feature films from the Saw and Hostel series, Hilary Neroni unites aesthetic and theoretical analysis to provide a unique portal into theorizing biopower and its relation to the desiring subject. Her work ultimately showcases film and television studies' singular ability to expose and potentially disable the fantasies that sustain torture and the regimes that deploy it.
Author: Michael Keller
Author: Senate Select Committee On Intelligence
Author: Ulrich Lehner
Author: Jared Del Rosso
Author: Larry Siems
Author: Alfred McCoy
Author: Shane O'Mara
Author: Alfred W. McCoy
Author: John W. Schiemann
Author: Hilary Neroni