Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: The Rule of Law Finds Its Golem: Judicial Torture Then and Now
- THE ISSUES
- ESSAYS
- Section One: Democracy, Terror and Torture
- 1 Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb
- 2 How to Interrogate Terrorists
- 3 Torture: Thinking about the Unthinkable
- 4 The Curious Debate
- 5 Is Defiance of Law a Proof of Success? Magical Thinking in the War on Terror
- 6 Through a Mirror, Darkly: Applying the Geneva Conventions to “A New Kind of Warfare”
- 7 Speaking Law to Power: Lawyers and Torture
- 8 Torture: An Interreligious Debate
- Section Two: On the Matter of Failed States, The Geneva Conventions, and International Law
- Section Three: On Torture
- Section Four: Looking Forward
- RELEVANT DOCUMENTS
- AFTERTHOUGHT
- Index
5 - Is Defiance of Law a Proof of Success? Magical Thinking in the War on Terror
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: The Rule of Law Finds Its Golem: Judicial Torture Then and Now
- THE ISSUES
- ESSAYS
- Section One: Democracy, Terror and Torture
- 1 Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb
- 2 How to Interrogate Terrorists
- 3 Torture: Thinking about the Unthinkable
- 4 The Curious Debate
- 5 Is Defiance of Law a Proof of Success? Magical Thinking in the War on Terror
- 6 Through a Mirror, Darkly: Applying the Geneva Conventions to “A New Kind of Warfare”
- 7 Speaking Law to Power: Lawyers and Torture
- 8 Torture: An Interreligious Debate
- Section Two: On the Matter of Failed States, The Geneva Conventions, and International Law
- Section Three: On Torture
- Section Four: Looking Forward
- RELEVANT DOCUMENTS
- AFTERTHOUGHT
- Index
Summary
“Are we litigating this war or fighting it?”
– interrogator with U.S. forces in BaghdadTHE WAR ON TERROR HAS DISPLACED THE COLD WAR AS THE DEFINING framework of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. An ironic consequence is that the most infamous penal colony in a Communist country is now located at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. We have come a long way since Solzhenitsyn. To Cuba, it turns out, the United States has spread not the blessings of liberty but the rule of manacles, stress positions, cages, and hoods. And Guantánamo Bay is merely one internment facility in a worldwide archipelago of U.S.-administered detention centers where terrorists, real and alleged, are incarcerated with little or no access to the outside world. Legal responsibility for what happens in these camps remains uncertain. But inside them detainees have been, and apparently continue to be, interrogated in a cruel, inhumane and degrading manner. We know that at least twenty or thirty prisoners have died in captivity, apparently from wounds inflicted by their American jailers. The sordid details have been widely publicized. Less evident are the reasons why the U.S. government has created such a system. The most paradoxical justification for what would otherwise be an odious violation of America's system of values is that such behavior alone makes it possible to protect America's system of values.
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- The Torture Debate in America , pp. 118 - 135Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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