Torture and State Violence in the United States PDF Download

Author: Robert M. Pallitto
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

View

Book Description
"Organized around five broad thematic periods in American history--colonial America and the early republic; slavery and the frontier; imperialism, Jim Crow, and World Wars I and II; the Cold War, Vietnam, and police torture; and the war on terror--this annotated documentary history traces the low and high points of official attitudes toward state violence."--Page 4 of cover.

Author: Deana Heath
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192646168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Joseph Pugliese
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415529743
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 243

View

Book Description
State Violence and the Execution of Law examines how law plays a fundamental role in enabling state violence and, specifically, torture, secret imprisonment, and killing-at-a-distance.

Author: Jinee Lokaneeta
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814765114
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 305

View

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: W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674244702
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

View

Book Description
Pulitzer Prize Finalist Silver Gavel Award Finalist “A sobering history of how American communities and institutions have relied on torture in various forms since before the United States was founded.” —Los Angeles Times “That Americans as a people and a nation-state are violent is indisputable. That we are also torturers, domestically and internationally, is not so well established. The myth that we are not torturers will persist, but Civilizing Torture will remain a powerful antidote in confronting it.” —Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell “Remarkable...A searing analysis of America’s past that helps make sense of its bewildering present.” —David Garland, author of Peculiar Institution Most Americans believe that a civilized state does not torture, but that belief has repeatedly been challenged in moments of crisis at home and abroad. From the Indian wars to Vietnam, from police interrogation to the War on Terror, US institutions have proven far more amenable to torture than the nation’s commitment to liberty would suggest. Civilizing Torture traces the history of debates about the efficacy of torture and reveals a recurring struggle to decide what limits to impose on the power of the state. At a time of escalating rhetoric aimed at cleansing the nation of the undeserving and an erosion of limits on military power, the debate over torture remains critical and unresolved.

Author: John Parry
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047205077X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 329

View

Book Description
Torture is about dominating the victim for a variety of purposes, including public order; control of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; and, domination for the sake of domination. This title explains that torture is already a normal part of the state coercive apparatus.

Author: Jinee Lokaneeta
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788125045564
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 293

View

Book Description

Author: Joseph Pugliese
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135073015
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 243

View

Book Description
State Violence and the Execution of Law stages a provocative analysis of how the biopolitical divide between human and animal has played a fundamental role in enabling state violence, including torture, secret imprisonment and killing-at-a-distance via drones. Analyzing the complex ways in which the United States government deploys law in order to consolidate and further imperial relations of power, Pugliese tracks the networks that enable the diffusion and normalization of the state’s monopoly of violence both in the US and in an international context. He demonstrates how networks of state violence are embedded within key legal institutions, military apparatuses, civilian sites, corporations, carceral architectures, and advanced technologies. The author argues that the exercise of state violence, as unleashed by the war on terror, has enmeshed the subjects of the Global South within institutional and discursive structures that position them as non-human animals that can be tortured, killed and disappeared with impunity. Drawing on poststructuralist, critical race and whiteness, and critical legal theories, the book is transdisciplinary in its approach and value. It will be invaluable to university students and scholars in Critical Legal and Socio-Legal Studies, Cultural Studies, Race and Ethnicity Studies, International Politics, and Postcolonial Studies.

Author: Jared Del Rosso
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231539495
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

View

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: John T. Parry
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472021788
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

View

Book Description
"John Parry's Understanding Torture is an important contribution to our understanding of how torture fits within the practices and beliefs of the modern state. His juxtaposition of the often indeterminate nature of the law of torture with the very specific state practices of torture is both startling and revealing." ---Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and author of Sacred Violence "Parry is effective in building, deploying, and supporting his argument . . . that the law does not provide effective protections against torture, but also that the law is in itself constitutive of a political order in which torture is employed to create---and to destroy or re-create---political identities.” ---Margaret Satterthwaite, Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Associate Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law "A beautifully crafted, convincingly argued book that does not shy away from addressing the legal and ethical complexities of torture in the modern world. In a field that all too often produces simple or superficial responses to what has become an increasingly challenging issue, Understanding Torture stands out as a sophisticated and intellectually responsible work." ---Ruth Miller, Associate Professor of History, University of Massachusetts, Boston Prohibiting torture will not end it. In Understanding Torture, John T. Parry explains that torture is already a normal part of the state coercive apparatus. Torture is about dominating the victim for a variety of purposes, including public order; control of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; and--- critically---domination for the sake of domination. Seen in this way, Abu Ghraib sits on a continuum with contemporary police violence in U.S. cities; violent repression of racial minorities throughout U.S. history; and the exercise of power in a variety of political, social, and interpersonal contacts. Creating a separate category for an intentionally narrow set of practices labeled and banned as torture, Parry argues, serves to normalize and legitimate the remaining practices that are "not torture." Consequently, we must question the hope that law can play an important role in regulating state violence. No one who reads this book can fail to understand the centrality of torture in modern law, politics, and governance. John T. Parry is Professor of Law at Lewis & Clark Law School.