This
is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of
modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading
experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to
the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to
electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British
colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of
Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin
America and Europe.
As Rejali traces the development and
application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he
reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he
argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace
for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more
indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered
and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern
torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of
reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the
world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim
was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even
existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such
as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress
positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so
too did these methods.
Rejali makes this troubling case in
fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented
research--conducted in multiple languages and on several
continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin
Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture,
Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really
works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave
and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future
studies of modern torture will be measured.