Talking About Torture

How Political Discourse Shapes the Debate

Jared Del Rosso

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231539494
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Social Sciences

When the photographs depicting torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were released in 2004, U.S. politicians attributed the incident to a few bad apples in the American military, exonerated high-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration, promoted Guantánamo as a model prison, and dismissed the illegality of the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation." By the end of the Bush administration, members of both major congressional parties had come to denounce enhanced interrogation as torture and argue for the closing of Guantánamo.

What initiated this shift? In Talking About Torture, Jared Del Rosso reviews transcripts from congressional hearings and scholarship on denial, torture, and state violence to document this wholesale change in rhetoric and attitude toward the use of torture by the CIA and the U.S. military during the War on Terror. He plots the evolution of the "torture issue" in U.S. politics and its manipulation by politicians to serve various ends. Most important, Talking About Torture integrates into the debate about torture the testimony of those who suffered under American interrogation practices and demonstrates how the conversation continues to influence current counterterrorism policies, such as the reliance on drones.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• A Note on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program
• Introduction
• 1. The Torture Word
• 2. The Heartbreak of Acknowledgment: From Metropolitan Detention Center to Abu Ghraib
• 3. Isolating Incidents
• 4. Sadism on the Night Shift: Accounting for Abu Ghraib
• 5. “Honor Bound”: The Political Legacy of Guantánamo
• 6. The Toxicity of Torture: Waterboarding and the Debate About “Enhanced Interrogation”
• 7. From “Enhanced Interrogation” to Drones: U.S. Counterterrorism and the Legacy of Torture
• Appendix: Constructionism and the Reality of Torture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index