American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond

by Michael Otterman

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Genres: Nonfiction, History, Politics

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Brandon Fryman]

A great history on how America Tortures prison inmates and how President Bush keep it going while in office. Really shows how illegal some of Bushe's torture techniques were. Why he got away with it while in office and really goes over all the internationl laws that h broke. The author also throws others from th Bush administration under the bus as well.

[Erkan Saka]

Repetitives towards the end.

[Sodom Hussein]

Difficult subject to read about but well written and includes a lot of important information.

[Mitch S]

A non fiction on the history of american torture. Morbidly fascinating if you are curious, but a lot of people looked at me weird for reading this. America uses acts of terrorism to transcend international war laws. We condemned Nazis for eugenics but america has done farrrrrr worse. They conclusively proved that rapport building ( a friendship type building excercise used by the FBI ) yields information from captured enemies. Then the CIA continues to advance new types of torture to "quell the new terror threat". After releasing the tortured detanies it breeds more actual terrorits because of what was done to the people. Americuhhh , torturing peeps to protect you.

aside from the interesting narrative on the evolution of american interrogation, theres a ton of survivor accounts of their time in CIA captivity.

Not for the easily sickened or well adjusted.

[Rebecca]

Overall, the author provided a clear, compelling summation of the history of torture and the US' policy toward using it and abusing international law. Not much of an argument or an ask from the reader, which was a bit refreshing. But, there was a clear underlying attempt to show the reader how absurd the US government was and is in interpreting and acting on how to best serve and preserve our country and its values by providing numerous, well-researched examples, such as our mirroring of Soviet psychological tactics and Nazi "scientific" experiments and more recently of Guantanamo and its repercussions. Very straight-forward read - I'd recommend to anyone with a remote interest in the War on Terror, current Bush policies and strategies, and international law.

[Eli Mandel]

I don't know whether it's fair to mark the book as read, or to give it a rating, when I only read the first half, but it was torturous enough that it had the intended affect, so I'm rating it and marking it as read.
This country of ours has some serious 'splaining to do.