Torture is perhaps the most unequivocally banned practice in the world today. Yet recent photographs from Abu Ghraib substantiated claims that the United States and some of its allies are using methods of questioning relating to the war on terrorism that could be described as torture or, at the
very least, as inhuman and degrading. In terror's wake, the use of such methods, at least under some conditions, has gained some prominent defenders, notably from within the White House. In this revised edition, Torture: A Collection brings together leading lawyers, political theorists, social
scientists, and public intellectuals to debate the advisability of maintaining the absolute ban and to reflect on what it says about our societies if we do--or do not--adhere to it in all circumstances. New to this edition are essays by Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan on the adoption in 2005
of the McCain Amendment, which explicitly bars the use of torture and other cruel methods of interrogation.
Ariel Dorfman: Foreword: The Tyranny of Terror: Is Torture Inevitable in Our Century and Beyond?
Acknowledgments
1. Sanford Levinson: Contemplating Torture: An Introduction
Part I: Philosophical Considerations
2. Henry Shue: Torture
3. Michael Walzer: Political
Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands
4. Jean Bethke Elshtain: Reflection on the Problem of "Dirty Hands"
Part II: Torture as Practiced
5. John H. Langbein: The Legal History of Torture
6. Jerome H. Skolnick: American Interrogation: From Torture to Trickery
7. Mark Osiel: The
Mental State of Torturers: Argentina's Dirty War
Part III: Contemporary Attempts to Abolish Torture through Law
8. John T. Parry: Escalation and Necessity: Defining Torture at Home and Abroad
9. Supreme Court of Israel: Judgment Concerning the Legality of the General Security
Service's Interrogation Methods
10. Miriam Gur-Arye: Can the War against Terror Justify the Use of Force in Interrogations? Reflections in Light of the Israeli Experience
11. Oona A. Hathaway: The Promise and Limits of the International Law of Torture
12. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: The
European Convention on Human Rights and Its Prohibition on Torture
13. Oren Gross: The Prohibition on Torture and the Limits of the Law
Part IV: Reflections on the Post-September 11 Debate about Legalizing Torture
14. Alan Dershowitz: Tortured Reasoning
15. Elaine Scarry: Five
Errors in the Reasoning of Alan Dershowitz
16. Richard A. Posner: Torture, Terrorism, and Interrogation
17. Richard H. Weisberg: Loose Professionalism, or Why Lawyers Take the Lead on Torture
18. Charles Krauthammer: The Truth About Torture
19. Andrew Sullivan: The Abolition of
Toture
Contributors
Index
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Sanford Levinson is the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr., Centennial Chair in Law and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Previous books include Constitutional Faith; Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies; and Wrestling with
Diversity. A frequent contributor to academic and popular journals, he has also been a long-time reviewer for the History Book Club.
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