1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9911008938803321

Autore

Athey Stephanie

Titolo

Torture in the National Security Imagination

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Minneapolis : , : University of Minnesota Press, , 2024

©2023

ISBN

9781452970370

1452970378

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (339 pages)

Classificazione

POL045000POL011000

Disciplina

364.6750973

Soggetti

Torture - Government policy - United States - History

National security - United States

Police brutality - United States - History

Counterinsurgency - United States - History - 20th century

POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / General

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.