Torture in the National Security Imagination

Torture in the National Security Imagination PDF Author: Stephanie Athey
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452970386
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Reassessing the role of torture in the context of police violence, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism At the midpoint of a century of imperial expansion, marked on one end by the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902 and on the other by post–9/11 debates over waterboarding, the United States embraced a vision of “national security torture,” one contrived to cut ties with domestic torture and mass racial terror and to promote torture instead as a minimalist interrogation tool. Torture in the National Security Imagination argues that dispelling this vision requires a new set of questions about the everyday work that torture does for U.S. society. Stephanie Athey describes the role of torture in the proliferation of a U.S. national security stance and imagination: as U.S. domestic tortures were refined in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, then in mid-century counterinsurgency theory and the networks that brought it home in the form of law-and-order policing and mass incarceration. Drawing on examples from news to military reports, legal writing, and activist media, Athey shows that torture must be seen as a colonial legacy with a corporate future, highlighting the centrality of torture to the American empire—including its role in colonial settlement, American Indian boarding schools, and police violence. She brings to the fore the spectators and commentators, the communal energy of violence, and the teams and target groups necessary to a mass undertaking (equipment suppliers, contractors, bureaucrats, university researchers, and profiteers) to demonstrate that, at base, torture is propelled by local social functions, conducted by networked professional collaborations, and publicly supported by a durable social imaginary.

Torture and Eucharist

Torture and Eucharist PDF Author: William T. Cavanaugh
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631211990
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In this engrossing analysis, Cavanaugh contends that the Eucharist is the Church's response to the use of torture as a social discipline.

The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture (Academic Edition)

The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture (Academic Edition) PDF Author: Senate Select Committee On Intelligence
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612198473
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
The study edition of book the Los Angeles Times called, "The most extensive review of U.S. intelligence-gathering tactics in generations." This is the complete Executive Summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the CIA's interrogation and detention programs -- a.k.a., The Torture Report. Based on over six million pages of secret CIA documents, the report details a covert program of secret prisons, prisoner deaths, interrogation practices, and cooperation with other foreign and domestic agencies, as well as the CIA's efforts to hide the details of the program from the White House, the Department of Justice, the Congress, and the American people. Over five years in the making, it is presented here exactly as redacted and released by the United States government on December 9, 2014, with an introduction by Daniel J. Jones, who led the Senate investigation. This special edition includes: • Large, easy-to-read format. • Almost 3,000 notes formatted as footnotes, exactly as they appeared in the original report. This allows readers to see obscured or clarifying details as they read the main text. • An introduction by Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones who led the investigation and wrote the report for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a forward by the head of that committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein.

The CIA in Hollywood

The CIA in Hollywood PDF Author: Tricia Jenkins
Publisher: Univ of TX + ORM
ISBN: 0292772475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
An in-depth study of the CIA’s collaboration with Hollywood since the mid-1990s, and the important and troubling questions it creates. What’s your impression of the CIA? A bumbling agency that can’t protect its own spies? A rogue organization prone to covert operations and assassinations? Or a dedicated public service that advances the interests of the United States? Astute TV and movie viewers may have noticed that the CIA’s image in popular media has spanned this entire range, with a decided shift to more positive portrayals in recent years. But what very few people know is that the Central Intelligence Agency has been actively engaged in shaping the content of film and television, especially since it established an entertainment industry liaison program in the mid-1990s. The CIA in Hollywood offers the first full-scale investigation of the relationship between the Agency and the film and television industries. Tricia Jenkins draws on numerous interviews with the CIA’s public affairs staff, operations officers, and historians, as well as with Hollywood technical consultants, producers, and screenwriters who have worked with the Agency, to uncover the nature of the CIA’s role in Hollywood. In particular, she delves into the Agency’s and its officers’ involvement in the production of The Agency, In the Company of Spies, Alias, The Recruit, The Sum of All Fears, Enemy of the State, Syriana, The Good Shepherd, and more. Her research reveals the significant influence that the CIA now wields in Hollywood and raises important and troubling questions about the ethics and legality of a government agency using popular media to manipulate its public image. “Fascinating, highly readable . . . Overall, Jenkins’s work is fresh and original, and demonstrates sound scholarship. The author has a passion for the topic that translates to vibrant writing. It is also a concise as well as entertaining look at an aspect of the CIA—its media relations with Hollywood—of which little is known. Enthusiastically written and incorporating effective, illustrative case studies, The CIA in Hollywood is definitely recommended to students of film, media relations, the CIA, and U.S. interagency relations.” —H-War

Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature

Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Larissa Tracy
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843843935
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
A new look at the way in which medieval European literature depicts torture and brutality.

Religious Imagination and the Body

Religious Imagination and the Body PDF Author: Paula M. Cooey
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195087356
Category : Body, Human
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Offering a feminist perspective on the significance of the body in the context of religious life and practice, this treatise examines the evidence, ranging from the novels of Toni Morrison to the paintings of Frida Kahlo.

The Rhetorical Invention of America's National Security State

The Rhetorical Invention of America's National Security State PDF Author: Marouf Hasian
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498505090
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The Rhetorical Invention of America’s National Security State examines the rhetoric and discourse produced by and constitutive of America’s national security state. Hasian, Lawson, and McFarlane illustrate the importance of rhetoric to the expansion of the American national security state in the post-9/11 era through their examination of the global war on terrorism, enhanced interrogation techniques, drone crew stress, activities of Edward Snowden, rise of Special Forces, and popular representations of counterterrorism. The coauthors contend this expansion was not the result of lone, imperial executives or a nefarious state within a state, but was co-produced by elite and non-elite Americans alike who not only condoned, but also in many cases demanded, the expansion of the national security state. This work will be of interest to scholars in communication studies and political science.

Courting Conflict

Courting Conflict PDF Author: Lisa Hajjar
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520937988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Israel's military court system, a centerpiece of Israel's apparatus of control in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, has prosecuted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. This authoritative book provides a rare look at an institution that lies both figuratively and literally at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lisa Hajjar has conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of Israelis and Palestinians—including judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, defendants, and translators—about their experiences and practices to explain how this system functions, and how its functioning has affected the conflict. Her lucid, richly detailed, and theoretically sophisticated study highlights the array of problems and debates that characterize Israel's military courts as it asks how the law is deployed to protect and further the interests of the Israeli state and how it has been used to articulate and defend the rights of Palestinians living under occupation.

Writing Beyond the State

Writing Beyond the State PDF Author: Alexandra S. Moore
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030344568
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This book investigates the imaginative capacities of literature, art and culture as sites for reimagining human rights, addressing deep historical and structural forms of belonging and unbelonging; the rise of xenophobia, neoliberal governance, and securitization that result in the purposeful precaritization of marginalized populations; ecological damage that threatens us all, yet the burdens of which are distributed unequally; and the possibility of decolonial and posthuman approaches to rights discourses. The book starts from the premise that there are deep-seated limits to the political possibilities of state and individual sovereignty in terms of protecting human rights around the world. The essays explore how different forms, materials, perspectives, and aesthetics can help reveal the limits of normative human rights and contribute to the cultural production of new human rights imaginaries beyond the borders of state and self.

Solitary Confinement

Solitary Confinement PDF Author: Lisa Guenther
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816686270
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. A searing and unforgettable indictment, Solitary Confinement reveals what the devastation wrought by the torture of solitary confinement tells us about what it means to be human—and why humanity is so often destroyed when we separate prisoners from all other people.