Darius Rejali: Why have modern democracies been such important innovators of torture?
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (1-21-08) [Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College. His latest books are Torture and Democracy, recently published by Princeton University Press, and Approaches to Violence, forthcoming this year from Princeton.] Americans were shocked at the photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. They were horrified by the assault on Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant molested with the broken end of a broomstick by New York City police officers in August 1997. A decade earlier, they were horrified by revelations that New York police officers had used stun guns to coerce confessions from young Hispanic and African-American suspects in 1985 and 1986. Our outrage is predictable because we reject the idea that democracies engage in torture. That’s something authoritarian states do in the words of a World War II poster, “the method of the enemy.” But torture has been documented in many modern democracies, not just our ow
