torture
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The Sound of Silence
So while silence can most certainly be boring, unsettling, unbearable, it can just as certainly be an aid to concentration and thus free the imagination. It can quiet the mind and open it to divine influences. This seems to depend on…
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This Week in Short Fiction
With the Senate Intelligence Committee’s online release of their Torture Report summary and Melville House’s announcement last week that it will publish a bound copy of the summary report at the end of this year, torture has been in the…
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“Fear and Anxiety…Link All of Us Across the Centuries”
An excerpt from Joel F. Harrington’s book The Faithful Executioners is a featured Longreads Members Pick and well worth a few minutes of your time. Starting with a creative nonfictional account of an executioner in Germany in the 1500s, the piece…
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Bradley Manning Receives 35-Year Prison Sentence
Bradley Manning, the whistleblower who leaked military documents to WikiLeaks, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison. As the Atlantic points out, this sentence “far exceeds any punishments related to the misconduct he revealed.” For example, the Abu Ghraib torturers…
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The Rumpus Review of Zero Dark Thirty
A dizzying blitz of descriptors surrounds Katheryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty: pro-torture, anti-torture; anti-Bush, pro-Obama; mindlessly jingoistic, nuanced in its critique of American exceptionalism.
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Guantánamo Diary
“They started taking detainees away every night, by groups of twenty. We didn’t know where they were going to, but we thought the US. One day, it was my group’s turn. The Pakistanis took away our chains and gave us…
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Tortured Confessions: The Rumpus Interview with Justine Sharrock
In her book Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things, journalist Justine Sharrock takes a close look at low-ranking soldiers who engaged in acts of torture.
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Politics Sunday
If you haven’t yet heard about Goodluck Jonathan, the new President of Nigeria, you should read this article. Why does everyone think artists are terrible at governing? Andrew Sullivan posts the full report from the Office of Professional Responsibility on “Enhanced…
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Lynndie England Sues Tortured Biographer
Former Army reservist Lynndie England, the international face of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, is suing her biographer for seizing control of what was intended to be a shared copyright. In July, writer Gary S. Winkler abruptly resigned from the…
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Why we need newspapers: They stand against tyranny
In the 1960s and 70s, Central and South America were rife with dictatorships which used secret police, the military, right-wing death squads and tight control of the media to quash dissent and keep power. One of the most egregious of…
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The Purifying Flame
Glen Duncan’s new novel, A Day and a Night and a Day, is an intense and involving story of a man pressed violently against his own limitations.
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How Western Pop Music is Being Used as ‘Touchless Torture’ by the American military
From Frieze Magazine: “As reported by the BBC, the Guardian, the Associated Press, Newsweek, The Nation, Mother Jones, SPIN and others (while mocked by right-wing columnists from the Chicago Tribune and The New York Sun), Western pop music has been…