San Antonio College Library

"Torture is banned because it is cruel and inhumane. But as Shane O'Mara writes in this account of the human brain under stress, another reason torture should never be condoned is because it does not work the way torturers assume it does. In countless films and TV shows such as Homeland and 24, torture is portrayed as a harsh necessity. If cruelty can extract secrets that will save lives, so be it. CIA officers and others conducted torture using precisely...

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...

From the publisher. Many Americans have condemned the "enhanced interrogation" techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human rights. But the United States has done almost nothing to prosecute past abuses or prevent future violations. Tracing this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, historian Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U.S....

""Something really bad happened here." So began army interrogator Tony Lagouranis's first briefing at Abu Ghraib. Lagouranis, who joined the army prior to September 11, 2001, had been looking for a chance to learn Arabic and do something meaningful with his life. When the U.S. went to war with Iraq, he was tapped to be an interrogator in places like Abu Ghraib, Mosul, North Babel, and Fallujah. But he never imagined his language skills would lead...

The authors propose a moral standard where each individual's interest counts equally in a volume that argues that the brutal act of torture may be permissible if it has the potential to save innocent lives. Original.

"Christ's Crucifixion is one of the most recognized images in Western visual culture, and it has come to stand as a universal symbol of both suffering and salvation. But often overlooked in this symbolic language is the fact that ultimately the Crucifixion is a scene of capital punishment. In The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel, Mitchell Merback reconstructs the religious, legal, and historical context of the Crucifixion and of other images of public...

"Victims of rape and torture experience a forced intimacy with their violators that may be exaggerated, unveiled, or obscured in the act of representation. Focusing on acts of "intimate violence" and their fictional representations, this study explores the disturbing dynamics that propel readers into intimate contact with the power of the rapist or the vulnerability of the victim."--BOOK JACKET. "Using such notorious works as D.M. Thomas's The White...