Use Of Torture Research Articles

The nonsensical smile of the torturer: documentary form and the logic of enjoyment

When it comes to shedding light on the hidden facts of the American use of torture at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere, Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure (2008), Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), and Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) represent major interventions into the contemporary political landscape, and their success is unqualified. They are successful in attacking the ideology of torture because they address it on the level of ideology. Pursuing the facts, however, leads these documentaries to miss the most disturbing aspect of the Abu Ghraib photos: the smiles on the faces of the torturers. The way each documentary deals with the issue (or avoids it) expresses the way that enjoyment acts as a stain that points to the symbolic failure of the violence of torture.

Status quo framing increases support for torture

Does describing torture by America's agents as a longstanding practice—part of the status quo—increase people's acceptance of the practice? A representative sample of U.S. adults, randomly assigned to conditions in which these practices were described as new or as having been used for more than 40 years, read about the use of torture in questioning of detainees. Torture described as a longstanding practice had more support and was seen as more effective and justifiable than the same torture described as new. Characterization of practices as longstanding—even if unpopular or disgraceful—enhances their support and increases their perceived justification.

The Global Fight Against Terrorism and its Perpetrators: ...Correcting a 'Wrong' by a 'Wrongful' Means?

Since the ugly attack on the United States on the 11th of September, 2001, the global community has understood clearly that the issue of terrorism and terrorists is indeed a major threat to global peace and stability. The former Secretary-General of the United Nations; Kofi Annan, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and others in the UN system have emphasized that while taking measures to counter terrorism, human rights norms must be rigorously respected. There is no doubt however that measures taken by countries in combating terrorism have become a license for disregard of human rights. The aim of this report therefore is to briefly examine how the fight against terrorism affects human rights, in particular, on issues like targeted killing, arrest and detention of prisoners abroad, adoption of national laws limiting human rights in case of allegations of terrorism, the use of torture and inhumane treatment as well as on refugee and asylum law.

IMF programs and human rights, 1981–2003

We examined the effects of International Monetary Fund (IMF) supervised programs on changes in government respect for physical integrity rights in developing countries between 1981 and 2003. A longer period under an IMF program increased government use of torture and extra judicial killing and also worsened the overall human rights conditions in developing countries. The use of a two-stage model ruled out the possibility that human rights practices would have worsened even if IMF programs had not been in effect. Previous studies of the impacts of IMF programs also found that they had worsened government respect for human rights. However, those studies did not control for the effects of selection. We found preliminary evidence that the worsened human rights conditions persisted even after the reforms in program lending of the late 1990s.

Answering Torture's Apologists: Recent Work on Torture, Democracy and French History

Two new books by Darius Rejali (Torture and Democracy, PUP, 2007) and Marnia Lazreg (Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad, PUP, 2008) explore the relationship between torture and democratic regimes in the 20th century, with implications not only for French history but also for contemporary debates about the use of torture in other parts of the world. Rejali's international history refutes contemporary apologists for torture by demonstrating both its historical ineffectiveness while also seeking to explain its proliferation among democratic and repressive regimes alike. Lazreg's ethnographic approach complements Rejali's empirical account by exploring the meaning of torture for both victims and perpetrators in French Algeria between 1954 and 1962.

Who is Jack Bauer?

Who is Jack Bauer?

Two Narratives of Torture

This article is about two different narratives or accounts of torture. Each narrative signifies a certain view about the legality and wisdom of employing torture and coercion in interrogation. Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the use of torture and coercion has become a topic of genuine debate, despite a sizable corpus of domestic and international law prohibiting those very practices. The first narrative of torture is centered on the ticking bomb scenario, the hypothetical that has frequently been deployed in the academic arena to overcome the absolutist nature of the legal prohibition on torture. Since 9/11, the ticking bomb scenario has also appeared in various official government documents and statements that assert the legality of torture and coercive interrogation techniques. It has also been replicated in popular culture, the most notable example being Fox's counterterrorism drama, 24. A second narrative of torture challenges the validity and usefulness of the ticking bomb scenario. Various academic commentators have unpacked the assumptions underlying the scenario. Certain government actors, most notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation and military lawyers, have consistently rejected the logic of the ticking bomb scenario, and opposed the use of torture and coercion in interrogation. This second narrative also has a popular culture representative in the form of Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. Thus, the same battles that have been fought over the treatment of detainees in the war on terror in the legal and political arenas by real world actors since 9/11 are also being fought at a discursive level in popular culture.

Desperately Seeking Sanity: What Prospects for a New Beginning in Zimbabwe?

In Zimbabwe's Harmonised Elections on 29 March 2008 the ruling party ZANU-PF suffered defeat in the parliamentary elections for the first time since 1980. Robert Mugabe also lost the first round of the presidential elections, indicating that both he and his party were facing the prospect of losing state power. The lack of an outright presidential winner in the first round of the elections necessitated a runoff election at the end of June 2008. Whereas the period preceding the March elections was relatively peaceful, the horrendous violence that marred the period leading up to the June runoff completely undermined the conditions for a free and fair runoff. With little pretence at creating the political climate for a democratic election, Mugabe's ZANU-PF rolled out a campaign of violence, the levels of which have not been witnessed in the country since the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland and the Midlands in the mid-1980s. Through a combination of extra-judicial executions, systematic use of torture, widespread population displacements, and a general campaign of terror, the Zimbabwean state targeted the structures and supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). As the electoral crisis deepened, the broader regional and international complexity of the Zimbabwean impasse imposed its imperatives on the unfolding crisis. Even as the Mugabe regime evoked more critical voices from within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU), long-standing divisions between the West and Africa on the Zimbabwe problem reasserted themselves. On 21 July 2008 the major political parties in Zimbabwe signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to begin negotiations for a political settlement under the auspices of the Mbeki-led SADC mediation begun in 2007. It remains to be seen whether the South African President can bring a positive conclusion to his much criticized policy of ‘quiet diplomacy’.

Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629) (review)

Reviewed by: Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629) Hans de Waardt Claudia Swan . Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii + 254. What is real and what fantasy? Where lies the boundary between the perception of nature and illusion? The Dutch engraver and painter Jacques de Gheyn II excelled both in the exact depiction of natural objects and in fanciful drawings and engravings about witches and demonic figures. In this book Claudia Swan examines his aims in rendering reality in these two genres, and what reality meant to him and the people among whom he worked. De Gheyn (1565–1629), styled "the second" to distinguish him from his father and son who had the same name, was born in Antwerp. In 1585, at the age of twenty, he settled in Haarlem, where Hendrick Goltzius instructed him in the art of engraving. Between 1590 and 1595 he lived in Amsterdam. He then moved to the university town of Leiden, and in 1603 he finally settled in nearby The Hague, the administrative center of the Dutch Republic. At that time the University of Leiden had, after a hesitant start in 1575, evolved into a major center of erudite learning and latitudinarian thinking. This offered the young artist ideal surroundings in which to perfect his skills in scientific materialism. Soon, his ability to depict herbs and flowers found in places like the university's new botanical garden was highly valued. Yet he not only depicted the plants there, but also the garden itself. Pieter Pauw, professor of anatomy and botany, was portrayed by De Gheyn in a rather theatrical depiction during an anatomical lecture and also in the course of his instructions in the garden. In this period De Gheyn also made minute drawings of insects and small animals. [End Page 230] Just after the turn of the century, however, he shifted much of his attention to a highly imaginary theme, namely, that of witchcraft. Illustrative of this transition is a pen and ink drawing he made in 1602–3, which contain both a detailed depiction of a hermit crab and a witchcraft scene. This conspicuous development, of course, provokes the question about the way in which De Gheyn perceived such preternatural activities. To solve this problem, Swan discusses the views of Dutch painters and critics concerning the possibility of representing nature realistically in works of art, to work nae het leven as the Dutch put it (i.e., from life), which was De Gheyn's position in this field. In the second part of her book, she shifts to De Gheyn's witches, and in the final chapter she proposes a balanced judgment on the degree to which the artist aimed at rendering a realistic image in the two genres he pursued. I find Swan's analysis very convincing. She is clearly well informed about the contemporaneous discussion concerning the degree to which realism is possible in art. She is also well versed in the—in so many ways very complicated—situation in the Dutch Republic. Her fluency in Dutch is certainly of great value here. An element of major importance is the fact that De Gheyn made this shift toward witchcraft scenes just in the period when it was becoming progressively difficult in the Netherlands to prosecute witches. In 1593 and 1594 the highest judicial authorities of the provinces Holland and Zeeland had rendered verdicts that made it impossible from then on to apply torture or the water test in such cases. The other five provinces soon adopted this new jurisprudence. From then on, it was only possible to convict somebody for witchcraft if the defendant's confession had been obtained without the use of torture. As a matter of fact, the last witch to be executed in the Republic, in 1608, had given such a voluntary statement. In 1594 the Court of Holland and Zeeland banned the water test on the advice of the professors of medicine and philosophy of the University of Leiden. On the court's request they had given it a disquisition that was clearly modeled...

The Secrets of the Kingdom: Religion and Concealment in the Bush Administration. By Hugh B. Urban

Hugh Urban built his scholarly career primarily through studies of South Asian Tantra, the cultural dynamics of Tantra's increasing profile in the West, and other forms of religion that stress occult aspects of sexual magic, including neo-paganism and Satanism. In recent years, he has widened his attention to additional religions in which secret knowledge plays a prominent role, including Scientology and Heaven's Gate. Urban's latest book brings this expertise to bear on a study of how the George W. Bush administration has used “religion and concealment.” This innocuous-sounding shorthand may itself conceal part of Urban's goal, because he intends a highly damning critique of Bush and his religious–political allies based how they have approached two issues. The first is their use of religion—how Bush's political power base includes a prominent place for conservative fundamentalists and neoconservative religious people, as well as how Bush draws on religious rhetoric and self-understanding. The second is how Bush has operated in relation to a nexus of issues concerned with controlling information: legal and illegal surveillance, propaganda based on half-truths and deliberate lies (and/or the use of narratives and “spin” that collapse the distinction between truths and lies), collusion with a highly centralized and biased corporate media, use of torture, enabling elites to pursue hidden agendas (as opposed to deliberating in democratic and transparent ways) when deciding public policies related to the environment and war, appealing to executive privilege and national security to cover up unpopular and/or criminal activities, and the like. “Secrecy” as a shorthand term for this nexus of issues is not wrong, but it could be misleading because the core issues boil down to the control of knowledge and use of lies in the service of elite power agendas.

Torture and the Christian conscience: a response to Jeremy Waldron

AbstractIn remarks offered in 2006 at a conference at Princeton Theological Seminary, inaugurating a National Religious Campaign against Torture, the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron observed that Christian leaders have contributed relatively little to the recent debate over the use of torture. This is regrettable, in his view, because secular morality does not have resources sufficient to address the question of torture, and a Christian perspective emphasising the absoluteness and divine character of the relevant moral norms would represent an important contribution to our reflections on this question. This article offers a response to Waldron's timely and important challenge, setting forth a Christian theological argument that the practice of torture is categorically prohibited. The basis for this prohibition does not rest, however, on the absoluteness of moral norms as such – rather, it rests on the distinctive character of torture as an egregious assault on the human person regarded as image of God.

Youth in a Suspect Society: Education Beyond the Politics of Disposability

As the United States becomes increasingly more authoritarian in its role as a national (in)security state, its use of surveillance, its suspension of civil liberties, its plundering of public goods, its assault on the social state, its suspension of basic social services, and its increasing use of torture and pure thuggery on the political level, it has become clear that the current generation of young people are no longer viewed as an important social investment or as a marker for the state of democracy and the moral life of the nation. Young people have become a generation of suspects in a society destroyed by the marriage of market fundamentalism, consumerism, and militarism. This article analyses the various economic and political conditions that relegate youth to the lowest national priority as part of a broader effort to connect the current war against young people to the crisis of democracy itself. At stake here is the ongoing political project of reminding adults of their ethical and political responsibility to future generations and to retheorise the category of youth as a powerful referent for a critical discussion about the long term consequences of current neoliberal policies while also gesturing towards the need for putting into place those conditions that make a democratic future possible. Moreover, the article argues that while young people increasingly become the ‘vanishing point’ of moral debate, it is crucial to revive a discourse of critique and possibility that connects the imperatives of an inclusive democracy with the purpose and meaning of higher education and the role of academics as public intellectuals.

Geography in Ominous Intersection with Interrogation and Torture: reflections on detention in Israel

This paper describes and reflects on the author's detention as a prominent Palestinian geographer in an Israeli prison for 23 days by the Israeli Security Police (Shin Bet) in July 2006, and the nightmare of abuse, debasement and physical coercion, amounting to torture, he was subjected to during this ordeal. The author argues that the detention was political, punishment for the way he has ‘done the geography of Palestine’ and has documented Israeli erasure of the Palestinians from the land. It was centred on extracting imagined ‘usable’ information from him about his contacts, especially in the field of geography in the Middle East. The paper develops a geographic analysis of the micro-space of detention, and places reflections in a framework that looks at the use of torture as a means to extract ‘intelligence’, at the current mounting intimidation of academics in the wake of 9/11, and at McCarthyism redux and the ‘“disciplining” of the disciplines’. It also looks at recent material describing analogous practices by the US army in interrogating detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The paper provides rich empirical first-hand documentation in the form of a thick description of abuse practices suffered by the author inside an Israel prison near Haifa (known as Al Jalama), such as sleep deprivation, environmental manipulation and mortification of the body by handcuffing, chaining and other practices.

Claire Harris's “Where the Sky Is a Pitiful Tent”: How Two Women Respond after Witnessing Political Torture

In her long poem “Where the Sky Is a Pitiful Tent”, Claire Harris juxtaposes quoted prose passages from I, Rigoberta Menchu to an imagined account, in poetry, of a woman's loss by murder of her rebel husband. Although Harris's topic in “Sky” is a dominant group's use of torture to control a resistant victimized group, the poet is primarily interested in the effects of such brutality on the rhetorical choices made by the two victimized women speakers, each of whom is recovering her voice in the aftermath of traumatic experience. In her two speakers Harris dramatizes the contrasting ways of knowing and speaking that Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule in Women's Ways of Knowing identify as “separate knowing” and “connected knowing”. They define the first of these approaches as “detached,” “public” and “disinterested”, the second as personal, “empathic”, “imaginative” and emotionally aware; both perceptual methods correspond to contrasting rhetorical purposes and methods. Harris shows that though each speaker recovers an authoritative voice, each voice reveals both surprising strengths and rhetorical effectiveness as well as a tendency for omissions and distortions resulting from self-protective instincts and from the limitations intrinsic to particular genres. Irony and paradox abound, as Harris dramatizes her two speakers' isolation as well as their mutual dependence: full awareness requires rhetorical and generic inclusiveness.

Torture v. the Basic Principles of the US Military

It has already been noted that the recent legal justifications for torture provided by Bush Administration officials contravene human rights law, international criminal law and international humanitarian law as expressed in treaties and customary rules. However, the author provides a legal and policy analysis informed by military law to demonstrate that the use of torture or ill-treatment of detainees also contravenes the stated policy of the US military and is inconsistent with the basic principles of lawful warfare. More importantly, torture and the ill-treatment of prisoners are both ineffective as an interrogation tool and also hamper military effectiveness by destroying discipline. These reasons, in addition to the obvious moral considerations, demonstrate why modern armies have consistently adhered to customary and treaty rules prohibiting torture and the ill-treatment of prisoners. The author concludes that the basic principles of warfare demand that this prohibition constitutes a bright-line rule that applies to all prisoners regardless of legal status.

May a State Torture Suspects to Save the Life of Innocents?

The old debate on the (Israeli) ticking bomb cases must be revisited in the light of the increasing threat by terrorist bombers and a recent German kidnapping case. Both cases may be combined as one ‘model case’ to test whether the claim of a truly absolute prohibition of torture can really stand in extreme situations where the use of torture may be the only means to obtain the necessary information to prevent great(er) harm for innocents. Even in these situations the absolute prohibition against torture must not be relaxed ex ante and in abstracto — given the unequivocal situation in international law and the negative policy implications a flexible approach would have. However, this does not necessarily entail the individual investigator's criminal responsibility ex post and in concreto given the conflicting duties — to respect the (terrorist) suspect's human dignity and at the same time (actively) protect potential victims of this suspect's action — he has to face. A just solution to this dilemma can only be found by distinguishing between, on the one hand, the state and the individual level, and on the other hand, between (non-) justification (wrongfulness) of the act of torture and excuse (personal blameworthiness) of the torturer. Thus, the investigator may be excused, but his conduct not justified, since this would convert the torture into something lawful or even socially acceptable and thus undermine the absoluteness of the conduct rule not to torture. This result is developed in the last part of this article taking into account the relevant provisions of the Israeli and German Penal Codes and the ICC Statute (Part 4). Before the Israeli and German cases can be compared (Part 1), some clarifications as to the status and rationale of the international prohibition of torture must be made (Part 2) and a ‘model case’, where preventive torture may be necessary should be considered (Part 3).

A Question of Identity: The Use of Torture in Asymmetric War

This article submits that torture is not an effective tool in asymmetric warfare. It offers a definition of ‘effective’ as it relates to torture, and presents findings which discriminate between torture's tactical utility and its strategic consequences. By doing this, it attempts to convey the paradoxical nature of torture. Torture can help gain bits of information that may prevent terrorist acts. But the very act of torture, or even the perception of its use, holds strategic consequences for those nations who employ it. While they may thwart a given attack, states that apply torture are labeled as torturers regardless of their tactical victories. In essence, their identity is associated with torture. Labeled as such, they endanger their place in politics, villainize themselves in history, and erode their soft power. Any nation involved in an asymmetric struggle would do well to engage the enemy at the strategic level of war, employing all the instruments of power, rather than rest its hopes of victory on the piecemeal and questionable bits of information torture may provide.

Torture and the Fifth Amendment

Over the past several years, military and intelligence personnel of the United States have tortured captives, gained information from others' torture of captives, or sent captives to be tortured. Even aside from statutory law and international treaties and conventions to which the United States is party, prohibition of torture by agents of the state is implicit in the very fabric of U.S. political society as embodied in the Constitution, especially the Fifth Amendment. The rights guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment derive from English common law, with its long and venerable history. Furthermore, common-law rights and protections permeate all of Anglo-American law. The Fifth Amendment plays a central role in these legal safeguards. Historical and analytic accounts of both the Fifth Amendment and torture may shed light on recent revelations of the use of torture.

Human Rights Violations, Corruption, and the Policy of Repression

Quantitative cross‐national research on human rights violations and repression has made considerable progress in identifying and eliminating economic and political factors that influence the use of torture and killing by governments. Warfare tends to increase violations, democracy—notably full democracy—and trade tends to inhibit violations. Where motives have been considered, this research has generally assumed a strategic motivation for government use of repression. Repression is employed to counter threats from the opposition as represented by the presence of warfare. Less attention has been given to the effect of implementation on levels of repression. Theory suggests that agents are likely to make a substantial independent contribution to the level of repression, if given the opportunity. In this article we develop this argument and present cross‐country comparative evidence that suggests that agents’ opportunities for hidden action measured by perceived levels of financial corruption substantially influences the incidence of torture in a political system, after controlling for the strategic motive of governments and the other factors found influential in earlier research. We show that the results are robust and not sensitive to alternative modeling, measurement, and research‐design decisions.

"You Cannot Continually Inflict": An Interview with Saadi Yacef

The Battle of Algiers (DZ/IT, 1966) remains one of the most powerful films ever made on war, colonialism, and imperialism. The film, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and scripted by Franco Solinas, was inspired by the book written by Saadi Yacef, Souvenirs de la Bataille d'Alger. It depicts a grim and brutal episode in a war that resulted in between 300,000 to 1.5 million Algerian and 18,000 French deaths. The war uprooted and turned into refugees over two million people out of a total of nearly nine million. In contrast, the current war in Iraq has turned into refugees about four million out of a population of twenty million. The issues raised by the film are as relevant today as they were in 1966 when the film was released: among these are the brutal effects of counterinsurgency. The use of torture dominates the headlines today as it did during the Algerian War. As the composite figure of Colonel Matthieu, the French paratroop colonel, says in the film in response to a question about the use of torture at a press conference, I'll ask you a question myself: Should France stay in Algeria? If the answer is still yes, you'll have to accept all the necessary consequences. The international uproar over renditions, Abu Ghraib, and the legal arguments inside the Bush administration since 9/11 justifying torture will see disturbing parallels with the issues raised more than forty years ago in The Battle of Algiers. Saadi Yacef joined the national liberation movement, Front de Liberation Nationale, in 1945 and by 1956 was the FLN's military chief of the Autonomous Zone of Algiers. He was captured by French troops during the Battle of Algiers, which was waged from January to October 1957. His capture and whether he broke under torture, revealing vital information to the French, remains a source of controversy to this day. A senior French officer, Paul Aussaresses, created an international political firestorm in 2001 when he asserted in Le Monde that the use of torture was sanctioned by the French government. Furthermore, Aussaresses said that then Minister of Justice, Francois Mitterand, had full knowledge and colluded with the French military during the Battle of Algiers to ward off criticism of their brutal methods. As today with the Bush administration's deliberate policy to ignore the application of the Geneva Convention protecting belligerents as regards Al- Qaeda and others in the Global War on Terror, the French military did not regard the combatants of the Algerian Liberation Movement as combatants deserving the protection of the Geneva Convention that prohibited the use of torture. In a fashion familiar to us today after 9/11, they were considered terrorists and deprived of the rights accorded to belligerents in war. The war was marked by the systematic use of torture, illegal executions, and disappearances by the French military in an effort to break the will of the Algerian Liberation movement. Aussaresses admitted in his 2001 memoir, Services speciaux, Algerie, 1955-1957 that he ordered his men to hang Larbi Ben M'Hidi and give out the story that he had committed suicide. He also said that he ordered an Algerian nationalist, Ali Boumendjel, to be thrown out of a building. Suicide was also offered as the alibi. All these issues made the release in 2004 of a new print of The Battle of Algiers in the United States timely in the midst of an increasingly difficult and bitter war in Iraq and Afghanistan for the United States and its allies. While much was made of an August 2003 screening by the Pentagon of the film, it should not be imagined that this was something new for the U.S. military. To the contrary, The Battle of Algiers had been known and seen by members of the U.S. military and defense intelligentsia for years. What was different with this release was that the creator and active participant in the making of the film (he plays himself in the movie), Saadi Yacef came to the United States in January 2004 to publicize the re-release of the film by Rialto. …