Description

Notes on the book: Torture & Democracy by Darius Rejali (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 849 pp. Torture and Democracy may be the standard academic text concerning torture. Twelve years in the writing, it surveys torture throughout the ages and during modern times in detail, covering 2,000 declassified and scholarly sources written in 14 different languages from key countries of the world that covers such periods as British military practices since 1700ʻs; practices under slavery in the 1800ʻs in the U.S. South; police practices in the U.S., Britain, and France since the 1920ʻs; colonial practices in Africa during the 1800ʼs and early 1900ʼs; practices of
authoritarian governments in South America during the 1950ʼs to the 1980ʼs; Allied, Axis, and Resistance practices during WWII during the between 1938-1945; practices of Chinese, North and South Koreans and U.S. during Korea; French army practices during the Battle for Algiers, Project Phoenix results during Vietnam; Israeli experience during the Intifada; practices during the South African struggle against apartheid; U.S. results during the Global War on Terror (GWOT); etc. It is highly unlikely that any presently remaining classified documents, when they become known, will substantively alter the basic results of this exhaustively researched work.