This volume brings together the most important writing on torture and the 'war on terror by one of the leading US voices in the torture debate. Philosopher and legal ethicist David Luban reflects on this contentious topic in a powerful sequence of essays including two new and previously unpublished pieces. He analyzes the trade-offs between security and human rights, as well as the connection between torture, humiliation, and human dignity, the fallacy of using ticking bomb scenarios in debates about torture, and the ethics of government lawyers. The book develops an illuminating and novel conception of torture as the use of pain and suffering to communicate absolute dominance over the victim. Factually stimulating and legally informed, this volume provides the clearest analysis to date of the torture debate. It brings the story up to date by discussing the Obama administration's failure to hold torturers accountable.

Follows the paper trail of torture memos that led to abuses at Guantanámo, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq.

"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.

David Luban analyzes the torture debate in the struggle against terrorism from a sophisticated philosophical and legal perspective.

As a result of the work assembling the documents, memoranda, and reports that constitute the material in The Torture Papers the question of the rationale behind the Bush administration's decision to condone the use of coercive interrogation techniques in the interrogation of detainees suspected of terrorist connections was raised. The condoned use of torture in any society is questionable but its use by the United States, a liberal democracy that champions human rights and is a party to international conventions forbidding torture, has sparked an intense debate within America. The Torture Debate in America captures these arguments with essays from individuals in different discipines. This volume is divided into two sections with essays covering all sides of the argument from those who embrace absolute prohibition of torture to those who see it as a viable option in the war on terror and with documents complementing the essays.

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.

In Torture and the Law of Proof John H. Langbein explores the world of the thumbscrew and the rack, engines of torture authorized for investigating crime in European legal systems from medieval times until well into the eighteenth century. Drawing on juristic literature and legal records, Langbein's book, first published in 1977, remains the definitive account of how European legal systems became dependent on the use of torture in their routine criminal procedures, and how they eventually worked themselves free of it. The book has recently taken on an eerie relevance as a consequence of controversial American and British interrogation practices in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In a new introduction, Langbein contrasts the "new" law of torture with the older European law and offers some pointed lessons about the difficulty of reconciling coercion with accurate investigation. Embellished with fascinating illustrations of torture devices taken from an eighteenth-century criminal code, this crisply written account will engage all those interested in torture's remarkable grip on European legal history.

Legal prohibitions against torture cannot prevent state violence

Documents US Government attempts to justify torture techniques and coercive interrogation practices in ongoing hostilities.

Moving past theoretical critiques of human rights, this book considers how we might translate situational analyses of torture into effective strategies for preventing it.