The Torturer in the Mirror
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- CHF 7.00
Description de l’éditeur
Before the US invasion of Iraq, before the American public saw the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib, the CIA went to the White House with a question: What, according to the Constitution, was the line separating interrogation from torture—and could that line be moved? The White House lawyers' answer—in the form of legal documents later known as the "Torture Memos"—became the US's justification for engaging in torture.
The Torturer in the Mirror shows us how when one of us tortures, we are all implicated in the crime. In three uncompromising essays, Iraqi dissident Haifa Zangana, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and professor of sociology Thomas Ehrlich Reifer teach us how physically and psychologically insidious torture is, how deep a mark it leaves on both its victims and its practitioners, and how necessary it is for us as a society to hold torturers accountable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three scorching essays admonish the Bush administration and outline how it "willfully violated the Geneva Conventions" following 9/11. Combined, these works by Zangana, an Iraqi dissident and one-time political prisoner under Saddam Hussein, former U.S. Attorney General Clark, and professor of sociology Ehrlich, establish the inhumanity and trauma of torture, the self-defeating effects of using torture in the name of "national security," and the violent hypocrisy for which most other countries in the world now fault the U.S. Zangana references the Abu Ghraib atrocities as the point when Iraqis began to "compare Saddam's regime with the brutality of the occupation," explaining that "Saddam's regime, unlike the U.S. administration, did not claim to promote human rights and democracy." Those Americans not upset by the knowledge that torture was committed by their leaders, Clark writes, "are themselves a threat to American freedom and human dignity." This powerfully lucid collection should be required reading for every American.
