Scott Horton expands on Gourevitch and Morris’s Sabrina Harman article, recommends Philippe Sands’s new book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, and reminds us that “seven contractors involved in the most brutal and reprehensible conduct at Abu Ghraib had their cases passed to the U.S. Attorney’s office” but nothing has happened four years later. His remarks are from the City University Law Review Symposium “Preventing Torture” and appear in Harper’s No Comment, March 28.
Archive for the ‘Articles’
What is torture? A primer on American interrogation
“It is not true, as many in the Arab world believe, that the United States has embarked on a reckless campaign of torture and abuse of its Arab prisoners of war. But what has happened is a slow slide from coherent, consistent standards for interrogation and treatment of prisoners to a sometimes ad-hoc, occasionally brutal search for information at all costs that should warrant public outcry. That it has not suggests either that this shift doesn’t interest us because it affects outsiders, or that we no longer consider torture or near-torture to be beyond the bounds of civil conduct.” Slate Magazine, The Torture Feature, by
Outsourcing Torture
“The pain was so unbearable, he said, that ‘you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.’ ”
Outsourcing Torture: The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program. By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, February 14, 2005.
The Water Cure
“Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water.” Article in The New Yorker by Paul Kramer, February 25, 2008.
Stand up and speak out to ban torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.