American Torture From The Philippines To Iraq Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of American Torture From The Philippines To Iraq book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
American Torture from the Philippines to Iraq by William L. D'Ambruoso Pdf
What explains the United States' persistent use of torture over the past hundred-plus years? Not only is torture incompatible with liberal values, it is also risky and frequently ineffective as an interrogation method. Drawing on archival testimony from the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), the Vietnam War, and the post-2001 war on terror, William L. d'Ambruoso argues that the norm against torture includes features that help explain why liberal democracies like the United States continue to violate it.
American Torture from the Philippines to Iraq by William L. d'Ambruoso Pdf
What explains the United States' persistent use of torture over the past hundred-plus years? Not only is torture incompatible with liberal values; it is also risky and frequently ineffective as an interrogation method. In American Torture from the Philippines to Iraq, William L. d'Ambruoso argues that the norm against torture has two features that help explain why liberal democracies like the United States have continued to violate it. First, the norm against torture paradoxically contributes to the belief that torture works. In naming certain behaviors as appropriate, norms also define what is inappropriate. Some policymakers and soldiers believe (not always unreasonably) that in the nasty world of international politics, cheaters--those who are willing to break the rules--have an advantage, especially in security matters. Bad becomes good because it appears effective, and rule-following is perceived as naïve and dangerous. Second, the anti-torture norm is not sufficiently specified to draw a definitive line between norm-compliant behavior and violations. For example, it is impossible to specify exactly how many hours must pass before forced standing becomes torture. As a result of torture's blurry definition, perpetrators can justify their actions by suggesting that the adversary is guilty of worse behavior, by using euphemisms such as enhanced interrogation, or by flatly denying that an act is torture. In short, lack of specificity leads to justifications and redefinitions, which in turn enable transgressions. Drawing on previously overlooked archival testimony from the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), the Vietnam War, and the post-2001 war on terror, d'Ambruoso shows that the rationale for using torture has remained remarkably consistent throughout the past century.
America in the Philippines, 1899-1902 by Christopher J. Einolf Pdf
America in the Philippines, 1899-1902: The First Torture Scandal analyzes the US army's use of the 'water cure' torture in the Philippine War and the ensuing political scandal that resulted. Drawing on primary source documents to construct a detailed narrative history of the events, the book also proposes an original theory for the causes of torture, which emphasizes the moral agency of low-level actors. Einolf uses the historical debate to illuminate theories of present-day human rights advocacy. The conclusion relates the Philippine War case to the more recent use of torture under the George W. Bush administration and makes recommendations for researchers and advocates.
Author : Mark Danner Publisher : New York Review of Books Page : 612 pages File Size : 45,8 Mb Release : 2004-10-31 Category : Political Science ISBN : UOM:39015060380915
Includes the torture photographs in color and the full texts of the secret administration memos on torture and the investigative reports on the abuses at Abu Ghraib. In the spring of 2004, graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison flashed around the world, provoking outraged debate. Did they depict the rogue behavior of "a few bad apples"? Or did they in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the "war on terror"? The images are shocking, but they do not tell the whole story. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents but the result of a chain of deliberate decisions and failures of command. To understand how "Hooded Man" and "Leashed Man" could have happened, Mark Danner turns to the documents that are collected for the first time in this book. These documents include secret government memos, some never before published, that portray a fierce argument within the Bush administration over whether al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and how far the US could go in interrogating them. There are also official reports on abuses at Abu Ghraib by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by US Army investigators, and by an independent panel chaired by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger. In sifting this evidence, Danner traces the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guant‡namo "migrated" to Iraq as resistance to the US occupation grew and US casualties mounted. Yet as Mark Danner writes, the real scandal here is political: it "is not about revelation or disclosure but about the failure, once wrongdoing is disclosed, of politicians, officials, the press, and, ultimately, citizens to act." For once we know the story the photos and documents tell, we are left with the questions they pose for our democratic society: Does fighting a "new kind of war" on terror justify torture? Who will we hold responsible for deciding to pursue such a policy, and what will be the moral and political costs to the country?
References to the Indian Wars, those conflicts that accompanied US continental expansion, suffuse American military history. From Black Hawk helicopters to the exclamation "Geronimo" used by paratroopers jumping from airplanes, words and images referring to Indians have been indelibly linked with warfare. In Indian Wars Everywhere, Stefan Aune shows how these resonances signal a deeper history, one in which the Indian Wars function as a shadow doctrine that influences US military violence. The United States' formative acts of colonial violence persist in the actions, imaginations, and stories that have facilitated the spread of American empire, from the "savage wars" of the nineteenth century to the counterinsurgencies of the Global War on Terror. Ranging across centuries and continents, Indian Wars Everywhere considers what it means for the conquest of Native peoples to be deemed a success that can be used as a blueprint for modern warfare.
Author : Katrin Dauenhauer Publisher : Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Page : 0 pages File Size : 40,8 Mb Release : 2015 Category : Foreign Language Study ISBN : 3653054133
The Shadow of Torture: Debating US Transgressions in Military Interventions, 1899-2008 by Katrin Dauenhauer Pdf
The Shadow of Torture investigates debates on US torture during the Philippine-American War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War with the aim to provide a historical contextualization of the torture debate in the United States in the wake of Abu Ghraib. It argues that there are significant continuities, contrary to popular claims to exceptionalism.
American Invasions: Canada to Afghanistan, 1775 to 2010 is a thought-provoking analysis of the reasons for American invasions and warmongering over the last two centuries. Contrary to the views expressed by the Western media and Western historians the American Empire is not a force for the promotion of free thinking and democracy but instead a force for imperial conquests and imposed dictatorships through the use of a military-industrial complex, fed by the American Empire outspending the rest of the world combined, on weapons of mass destruction. The American Empire has used and will continue to use the most sophisticated weapons, from nuclear bombs to bunker-busting bombs to land mines to chemical and biological weapons, on defenseless men, women, and children to feed its insatiable appetite for warmongering and imperial expansion. It combines military bases around the world with military prisons used for torture and extraction of information. Its navy patrols every corner of the globe, and its planes can rain down bombs from the heavens on every civilian on the planet.
On the evening of September 11, 2002, with the Statue of Liberty shimmering in the background, television cameras captured President George W. Bush as he advocated the charge for war against Iraq. This carefully staged performance, writes Susan Brewer, was the culmination of a long tradition of sophisticated wartime propaganda in America. In Why America Fights, Brewer offers a fascinating history of how successive presidents have conducted what Donald Rumsfeld calls "perception management," from McKinley's war in the Philippines to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Her intriguing account ranges from analyses of wartime messages to descriptions of the actual operations, from the dissemination of patriotic ads and posters to the management of newspaper, radio, and TV media. When Woodrow Wilson carried the nation into World War I, he created the Committee on Public Information, led by George Creel, who called his job "the world's greatest adventure in advertising." In World War II, Roosevelt's Office of War Information avowed a "strategy of truth," though government propaganda still depicted Japanese soldiers as buck-toothed savages. After examining the ultimately failed struggle to cast the Vietnam War in a favorable light, Brewer shows how the Bush White House drew explicit lessons from that history as it engaged in an unprecedented effort to sell a preemptive war in Iraq. Yet the thrust of its message was not much different from McKinley's pronouncements about America's civilizing mission. Impressively researched and argued, filled with surprising details, Why America Fights shows how presidents have consistently drummed up support for foreign wars by appealing to what Americans want to believe about themselves.
American Exceptionalism by Hilde Eliassen Restad Pdf
How does American exceptionalism shape American foreign policy? Conventional wisdom states that American exceptionalism comes in two variations – the exemplary version and the missionary version. Being exceptional, experts in U.S. foreign policy argue, means that you either withdraw from the world like an isolated but inspiring "city upon a hill," or that you are called upon to actively lead the rest of the world to a better future. In her book, Hilde Eliassen Restad challenges this assumption, arguing that U.S. history has displayed a remarkably constant foreign policy tradition, which she labels unilateral internationalism. The United States, Restad argues, has not vacillated between an "exemplary" and a "missionary" identity. Instead, the United States developed an exceptionalist identity that, while idealizing the United States as an exemplary "city upon a hill," more often than not errs on the side of the missionary crusade in its foreign policy. Utilizing the latest historiography in the study of U.S. foreign relations, the book updates political science scholarship and sheds new light on the role American exceptionalism has played – and continues to play – in shaping America’s role in the world. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of US foreign policy, security studies, and American politics.
In No Middle Ground: Anti-Imperialists and Ethical Witnessing During the Philippine-American War, Erin L. Murphy argues that activists in the Anti-Imperialist movement against the Philippine-American War, led by the Anti-Imperialist League, followed an evolving path of ethical witnessing where leaders empathically considered the experience of imperialist violence as it was expressed by marginalized anti-imperialists. Murphy explores how the perspectives of marginalized anti-imperialists like white women, black women and men, and Filipino/as, led Anti-Imperialist League leaders, who were predominantly white men of some prominence, to evolve their activism from focusing on defending the U.S. Constitution through electoral politics and the legality of U.S. Empire to exposing the imperialist violence committed by the U. S. military as crimes against fundamental human rights. Activists believed that advocating for human rights held true to the principles in the U.S. Constitution while U.S. Empire only dismembered it. Murphy further analyzes the ways in which Anti-Imperialist League leaders and supporters began forming other organizations based on the principles of advocating for human rights and liberty, such as the National Association for Colored People, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, National Consumers League, American Civil Liberties Union, and the Ethical Society.
Author : Jared Del Rosso Publisher : Columbia University Press Page : 297 pages File Size : 49,8 Mb Release : 2015-06-09 Category : Social Science ISBN : 9780231539494
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.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day. But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War. “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University “Conclusively, McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire is an impressive historical piece of research that appeals not only to Southeast Asianists but also to those interested in examining the historical embedding and institutional ontogenesis of post-colonial states’ police power apparatuses and their apparently inherent propensity to implement illiberal practices of surveillance and repression.”—Salvador Santino F. Regilme, Jr., Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs “McCoy’s remarkable book . . . does justice both to its author’s deep knowledge of Philippine history as well as to his rare expertise in unmasking the seamy undersides of state power.”—POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize, Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies
In the Shadows of the American Century by Alfred W. McCoy Pdf
The award-winning historian delivers a “brilliant and deeply informed” analysis of American power from the Spanish-American War to the Trump Administration (New York Journal of Books). In this sweeping and incisive history of US foreign relations, historian Alfred McCoy explores America’s rise as a world power from the 1890s through the Cold War, and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. Since American dominance reached its apex at the close of the Cold War, the nation has met new challenges that it is increasingly unequipped to handle. From the disastrous invasion of Iraq to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fracturing military alliances, and the blundering nationalism of Donald Trump, McCoy traces US decline in the face of rising powers such as China. He also offers a critique of America’s attempt to maintain its position through cyberwar, covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.
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.
