Arcadia Public Library

Explores the issues surrounding torture by placing opinions from a wide range of sources in a pro/con format. Features articles that express various perspectives on this topic.

"Torture is banned because it is cruel and inhumane. But as Shane O'Mara writes in this account of the human brain under stress, another reason torture should never be condoned is because it does not work the way torturers assume it does. In countless films and TV shows such as Homeland and 24, torture is portrayed as a harsh necessity. If cruelty can extract secrets that will save lives, so be it. CIA officers and others conducted torture using precisely...

Koji Wakamatsu's epic docudrama explores the political unrest of 1960s Japan, when mass student uprisings coincided with the beginnings of the far-left United Red Army group, which tortured and murdered its "deviant" members during a 1972 training session. An uncompromising piece of filmmaking from one of Japan's most controversial filmmakers, with a score by American musician (and ex-Sonic Youth member) Jim O'Rourke.

"Hell can get you down. It's big, hot, often painful, and a hard place to get creative projects done. But something else is bothering inmate PKRx354--something beyond the unrelenting and often absurd torture routines, the demons, or the tormenting trio of his mother, father, and girlfriend also consigned to the Underworld. Luckily there's help: Fred Greenberg--Hell's only psychotherapist. With Fred's stoic and perceptive guidance, the "talking cure"...

The Torture Papers consists of the "torture memos" and reports written by U.S. government officials to prepare the way for and to legitimize coercive interrogation and torture in Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and Abu Ghraib. This volume of documents presents for the first time a compilation of materials that prior to publication have existed only piecemeal in the public domain. The Bush Administration, concerned about the legality of harsh interrogation...

Iowa. Two years ago Liv Fleming's father claimed he had been abducted by aliens-- and shortly after disappeared. Liv has accepted that he's dead, but every Sunday she and her friend Doug Monk continue to check the "alien traps" her father had set us. When they discover a creature so inhuman it can only be one thing, they choose to take matters into their own hands instead of turning him over to the authorities. -- adapted from jacket

CIA torture, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and other examples of U.S. military abuse, have a history. A key part of it is revealed in Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins. Through his extraordinary life and daring actions we learn about Fr. Roy Bourgeois and his struggle to find and reveal the truth about the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), and growing efforts by grassroots activists and Congress to shut it down. PBS "Global Voices"...

Collects the stories of the American soldiers who took and appeared in the controversial digital photographs from Abu Ghraib, in a collaborative account of Iraq's occupation that reveals how it is being experienced by both guards and prisoners.