by Darius Rejali
Princeton University Press, 2007 880 pp $39.95
AMERICA, UNDER George W. Bush, became a torturing country. Everyone knows it. One of Bush’s worst lies is this: “I’ve said to the people that we don’t torture, and we don’t.” It is not just that the president’s words are demonstrably false, as evidenced by the sworn congressional testimony of the director of Central Intelligence and the horrific photographs from Abu Ghraib. What is most pernicious about Bush’s lie is that almost everyone would desperately want to believe it. Torture is so profoundly incompatible with modern liberalism that it took just six weeks after the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789 for France’s deputies to abolish judicial torture. So how can democracies torture today?
The answer is, in their own special way. As Darius Rejali explains in a sprawling, essential book, Torture and Demo...
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