Torture in the national security imagination / Stephanie Athey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Athey, Stephanie, 1964- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Torture--Government policy--United States--History.

Torture.

National security--United States.

National security.

Police brutality--United States--History.

Police brutality.

Counterinsurgency--United States--History--20th century.

Counterinsurgency.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (339 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2023]

Summary:

Reassessing the role of torture in the context of police violence, mass incarceration, and racial capitalism At the midpoint of a century of imperial expansion, marked on one end by the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902 and on the other by post-9/11 debates over waterboarding, the United States embraced a vision of "national security torture," one contrived to cut ties with domestic torture and mass racial terror and to promote torture instead as a minimalist interrogation tool. Torture in the National Security Imagination argues that dispelling this vision requires a new set of questions about the everyday work that torture does for U.S. society. Stephanie Athey describes the role of torture in the proliferation of a U.S. national security stance and imagination: as U.S. domestic tortures were refined in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, then in mid-century counterinsurgency theory and the networks that brought it home in the form of law-and-order policing and mass incarceration. Drawing on examples from news to military reports, legal writing, and activist media, Athey shows that torture must be seen as a colonial legacy with a corporate future, highlighting the centrality of torture to the American empire--including its role in colonial settlement, American Indian boarding schools, and police violence. She brings to the fore the spectators and commentators, the communal energy of violence, and the teams and target groups necessary to a mass undertaking (equipment suppliers, contractors, bureaucrats, university researchers, and profiteers) to demonstrate that, at base, torture is propelled by local social functions, conducted by networked professional collaborations, and publicly supported by a durable social imaginary.

Contents:

Prologue: "A nasty business" in the public press

Introduction: U.S. torture, prisons, police

Anecdote : Abdul Hakim Murad and torture in four dimensions

Rationale : the refashioning of colonial violence-Roger Trinquier, Jean Larteguy, and Edward Lansdale

Archetype : mistaking the plurals of torture

Technique : the waterboard spectacle

Perpetrators : Sabrina Harman, Tony Lagouranis, and crafted confession

Networks : deploying the Salvador Option

Epilogue: Complicity.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Athey, Stephanie Torture in the National Security Imagination

ISBN:

9781452970370

1452970378

OCLC:

1416891941