Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition, by W. Fitzhugh Brundage.

Civilizing Torture amplifies the echoes of pre-9/11 American experiences with torture - dehumanization of the enemy, justifications for torture, claims of efficacy, the fleeting nature of the public debate about torture and what it meant, and more - and in so doing reminds us of how the traditional seems forever new - and so is repeated all too often.

Institutionalizing torture in Israel: The Firas Tbeish decision. A commentary by John W. Schiemann, PhD.

In her discussion of the court's dismissal of the IP, she says there "is a legal system that discredits the IP's potential while digging deeper into its own conception of torture.'' Shir has helped show that this is true more broadly of torture, beyond the IP. Indeed, I suspect the court may not view the IP as a "strange creature" causing "suspicion of the unfamiliar." Instead, it may be by now a very familiar creature that threatens torture's impunity in Israel, and what Shir shows is that the court has developed a systematic strategy to counter it. Torture is possible in Israel because the government and courts are complicit in deliberately creating a legal and institutional black hole where boundaries are ill-defined and obscure, and no light can shine.

Torturing science Science, interrogational torture, and public policy.

Contrary to the claims of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that its torture program was scientific, the program was not based on biology or any other science. Instead, the George W. Bush administration veneered the program's justification with a patina of pseudoscience, ignoring the actual biology of torturing human brains. We reconstruct the Bush administration's decision-making process to establish that the policy decision to use torture took place in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks without any investigation into its efficacy. We then present the pseudoscientific model of torture sold to the CIA, show why this ad hoc model amounted to pseudoscience, and then catalog what the actual science of torturing human brains-available in 2001-reveals about the practice. We conclude with a discussion of how a process incorporating countervailing evidence might prevent a policy going forward that is contrary to law, ethics, and evidence.

Tortured Logic: Information and Brutality in Interrogations.

BACKGROUND: Pragmatic arguments for interrogational torture rest on the twin assumptions that torture generates reliable information and that torture can be controlled and limited. METHODS: I assess the claims of torture proponents by providing the intuition behind a game theoretic model of interrogational torture. Tracing out the logic of different combinations of possible interrogators and detainee types results in eight outcomes that can be compared to three claims made by torture proponents: that information will be predictably reliable, that the frequency of torture will be minimized, including no torture of innocents, and that the severity of torture can likewise be limited and controlled. FINDINGS: Of the eight outcomes generated by the model, only two result in full information, but an innocent is tortured in both and in one the detainee providing information is tortured after having no more information to give. Moreover, these outcomes are only possible for an extremely restricted and empirically unlikely combination of circumstances. With respect to torture frequency, detainees are tortured in seven of the eight outcomes, including innocent detainees. The incentives facing interrogators also compel them to ratchet up their brutality in an effort to compel information. DISCUSSION: The outcomes of a model of interrogational torture based on the proponent ideal violate the three conditions individually necessary to support that ideal: (1) information from torture is unpredictable and unreliable, with no information and false information far more likely than good information; (2) torture will be used more frequently-including against innocents-than control and limits permit; (3) torture will be more brutal than controls and limits allow. CONCLUSION: The only thing reliably effective about interrogational torture is its ability to generate slippery slopes of frequency and brutality, violating the basic premises of the pragmatic argument for interrogational torture.