Review of Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy.

• Date: 22 September 2008
• Author: Gilmore, Scott
• Published date: 22 September 2008
• Author: Gilmore, Scott

Darius Re jail, Torture and Democracy. Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2007. $39.50 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-11422-4.

LONG BEFORE THE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM ABU GHRAIB WERE LEAKED TO AN astonished public, an Iranian-American political science professor named Darius Rejali was at work on a history of torture in the modern era. Torture and Democracy arrives as the focus on torture in the United States has become unfortunately myopic. Whereas there have been excellent exposes on the Bush administration's interrogation policies--Karen Greenberg's anthology, The Torture Debate in America, Philippe Sands' The Torture Team, and Jane Mayer's The Dark Side--no major work has situated current events in the context of 20th-century histories of discipline and punishment, knowledge and pain. "Torture lite" and "enhanced interrogation techniques" did not spring Athena-like from the minds of the Office of Legal Counsel. Nor were the brutalities of Abu Ghraib the inventions of a few sadists in the 372nd Military Police Company. These methods have a well established if forgotten pedigree: the road to Abu Ghraib was longer than it seemed.

Darius Rejali's monumental book fills in the blanks. Following on the heels of his Torture and Modernity, an examination of the political culture of torture in Iran, Torture and Democracy cements Rejali's reputation and promises to reframe the current debate. Weighing in at 849 pages, Re jail's tome is no light reading. And yet, despite the dark subject matter, his prose is buoyant and humanely, even beautifully written. Throughout the book, he maintains a deeply felt authorial presence as his examination of the means of torture cuts across quantitative and qualitative lines.

His chattiness aside, the work remains empirically grounded and logically rigorous. Rejali has performed an exhaustive survey of the legal, medical, and social science literature on torture in over a dozen languages. Using this body of evidence, he makes a compelling case. Carefully and devastatingly, Rejali argues that modern torture is as much an adaptation to democratic institutions as it is a relic from an unenlightened past. Under the scrutiny of civil societies and the rise of the international human rights regime, interrogators have refined tortures that inflict pain, yet leave no marks. Like stealth weaponry, torture's modernity lies in its invisibility.

Rejali observes a global decline of the scarring techniques that characterized...