The role of torture in recent Iranian politics is the subject of Ervand Abrahamian's important and disturbing book. Although Iran officially banned torture in the early twentieth century, Abrahamian provides documentation of its use under the Shahs and of the widespread utilization of torture and public confession under the Islamic Republican governments. His study is based on an extensive body of material, including Amnesty International reports, prison literature, and victims' accounts that together give the book a chilling immediacy. According to human rights organizations, Iran has been at the forefront of countries using systematic physical torture in recent years, especially for political prisoners. Is the government's goal to ensure social discipline? To obtain information? Neither seem likely, because torture is kept secret and victims are brutalized until something other than information is obtained: a public confession and ideological recantation. For the victim, whose honor, reputation, and self-respect are destroyed, the act is a form of suicide. In Iran a subject's "voluntary confession" reaches a huge audience via television. The accessibility of television and use of videotape have made such confessions a primary propaganda tool, says Abrahamian, and because torture is hidden from the public, the victim's confession appears to be self-motivated, increasing its value to the authorities. Abrahamian compares Iran's public recantations to campaigns in Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, and the religious inquisitions of early modern Europe, citing the eerie resemblance in format, language, and imagery. Designed to win the hearts and minds of the masses, such public confessions—now enhanced by technology—continue as a means to legitimize those in power and to demonize "the enemy."

3 The Islamic Republic

In 1952, during the Korean War, Colonel Frank H. Schwable became the second-highest-ranking officer held as a prisoner of war by the Communists. His captivity was marked by months of physical and psychological torture that resulted in a signed confession asserting that the United States had used germ warfare on Korean civilians. This serious allegation reverberated throughout the American media with devastating consequences to Col. Schwable's reputation. Once he was released, an official Marine Corps inquiry was made into his false confession and uncovered the effect psychological torture had on a distinguished and decorated officer's actions.

At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period. Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.

The extreme interrogation tactics permitted after the 9/11 attacks illustrate that the level of fear in society can influence the law of interrogation. In light of controversial water boarding policies and extraterritorial detention centers, what is the basis for interrogation law in the United States? What is the historical precedent for giving potential criminals the right to "remain silent" or confess to a crime? In Confessions of Guilt, esteemed scholars of law and criminal procedure George Thomas and Richard Leo tell the story of how, over the centuries, the law of interrogation moved from indifference about extreme pressure to concern over the slightest pressure, and back again. Demonstrating that the law of interrogation is inherently unstable and highly dependent on the perceived levels of threat felt by a society, the authors shed light on the nuanced and fascinating history of interrogation practices, both new and old.

The role of torture in recent Iranian politics is the subject of Ervand Abrahamian's important and disturbing book. Although Iran officially banned torture in the early twentieth century, Abrahamian provides documentation of its use under the Shahs and of the widespread utilization of torture and public confession under the Islamic Republican governments. His study is based on an extensive body of material, including Amnesty International reports, prison literature, and victims' accounts that together give the book a chilling immediacy. According to human rights organizations, Iran has been at the forefront of countries using systematic physical torture in recent years, especially for political prisoners. Is the government's goal to ensure social discipline? To obtain information? Neither seem likely, because torture is kept secret and victims are brutalized until something other than information is obtained: a public confession and ideological recantation. For the victim, whose honor, reputation, and self-respect are destroyed, the act is a form of suicide. In Iran a subject's "voluntary confession" reaches a huge audience via television. The accessibility of television and use of videotape have made such confessions a primary propaganda tool, says Abrahamian, and because torture is hidden from the public, the victim's confession appears to be self-motivated, increasing its value to the authorities. Abrahamian compares Iran's public recantations to campaigns in Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, and the religious inquisitions of early modern Europe, citing the eerie resemblance in format, language, and imagery. Designed to win the hearts and minds of the masses, such public confessions—now enhanced by technology—continue as a means to legitimize those in power and to demonize "the enemy."

With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s political machine, from aldermen to the mayor’s office. [TAYLOR’s BOOK] takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed—through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department’s “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.

This collection of essays will address some of the most controversial issues surrounding torture: how it is used by governments, legal definitions of torture, the theological implications of torturing, torture in declared states of emergency and why it should be prohibited.

The torture ring that operated out of Chicago Police Department Area 2 and 3 headquarters for more than two decades is one of the most terrible and harrowing stories of injustice to take place in my lifetime. Journalists, lawyers and activists played their part in exposing this nightmare, but the victims of police torture themselves did the most to make the truth known, and against steep odds, they were heard. Jon Burge may have never seen the inside of a jail cell like he should have, but thanks in large part to Stanley Howard and the other authors of this book, he will never be remembered as anything other than a monstrous criminal. This book tells the story of police torture in Chicago from the inside—literally—and when you read it, you’ll agree that no one has done a better job of telling all of it. Nothing can ever make up for the injustices these men suffered. But if we can stop this state-sponsored crime from ever happening again, we will have Stanley, Mark, Marvin and Ronnie to thank for it. — Alan Maass, author, The Case for Socialism; editor, SocialistWorker.org Tortured by Blue is not a story about individual survival in the face of horrific circumstances. It is a story about the multitude of individuals (police, prosecutors, judges, elected officials to name a few), practices, and systems that looked the other way and knowingly ALLOWED for the police torture of men and women in Chicago to continue on for decades. With the turn of each page, my rage grew, and with it a commitment to making sure the truths Stanley Howard, Mark Clements, Marvin Reeves and Ronald Kitchen lifts up in their writings are shared widely and result in accountability and substantive change so no individual or family has to go through what the police torture survivors had to experience. —Cindy Eigler, director of policy and strategic initiatives, Chicago Torture Justice Center Swept under the rug for too long, the wrongful convictions and police abuses described in [Torture by Blue] are a very real part of the history of the city of Chicago. Studying that history is crucial to avoiding the mistakes of the past, and [the author’s] deserves considerable credit from pulling it all together. Well -researched and comprehensive in scope, [the author’s] book doses an excellent job of telling this important story. —Jon Lovey, civil rights attorney specializing in police misconduct

This book argues the need for the establishment of an exclusionary rule of evidence in China as a means of protecting the people from police wrongdoing. In support of the argument and as a means of developing a suitable process, the author takes a comparative approach to the foundation and development of the exclusionary rule in the UK and the USA, whilst also exploring the issues that may arise in transferring the rule from one legal system to another.