A01=Christoher H. Pyle
Author_Christoher H. Pyle
Category=JPVH
Category=JPWL
Category=JWXK
Category=JWXR
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Product details
- ISBN 9781597973878
- Weight: 708g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 2009
- Publisher: Potomac Books Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
That American forces should torture prisoners in their “war” on terror is disturbing, but more shocking still is that the highest officials of the Bush-Cheney administration planned, authorized, encouraged, and concealed these war crimes. When the Supreme Court ruled that the officials were bound by the Geneva Conventions, a Republican Congress responded by granting amnesty to all responsible, from lowly interrogators to the president, while conservative judges erected a wall of secrecy to protect them even from civil liability. Meanwhile, timid Democrats have shown little stomach for repealing the amnesty law and bringing those responsible to justice.
Many Americans, including those who endorsed torture to find “ticking bombs” that never were, are now embarrassed by credible reports of CIA kidnappings for purposes of torture, secret prisons into which prisoners have disappeared without a trace, and rigged tribunals to convict al Qaeda’s criminals on evidence obtained by torture. But the problem is not just embarrassment; it is the widespread acceptance of unaccountable, secret government that now threatens to destroy the very foundations of constitutional government. The moral standing of the United States will not be restored, Christopher Pyle argues, until a concerted effort is made to bring our secret government under the rule of law.
Many Americans, including those who endorsed torture to find “ticking bombs” that never were, are now embarrassed by credible reports of CIA kidnappings for purposes of torture, secret prisons into which prisoners have disappeared without a trace, and rigged tribunals to convict al Qaeda’s criminals on evidence obtained by torture. But the problem is not just embarrassment; it is the widespread acceptance of unaccountable, secret government that now threatens to destroy the very foundations of constitutional government. The moral standing of the United States will not be restored, Christopher Pyle argues, until a concerted effort is made to bring our secret government under the rule of law.
In 1970, Christopher Pyle disclosed the military’s surveillance of civilian politics in a pair of award-winning articles. As a former captain in Army intelligence, he also recruited 125 former agents to tell what they knew about that spying to Congress, the courts, and the press. Those disclosures ended the Army’s domestic spying and began a series of investigations into the misuse of intelligence agencies that historians now refer to as the Watergate era. Pyle worked on those investigations a consultant to Senator Sam J. Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights and Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence. Since 1976, he has taught constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College and written extensively on freedom of expression, equal protection of the laws, and rights of privacy. Pyle is the author of four books, the most recent, Extradition, Politics, and Human Rights, analyzes how the United States went from being a nation of asylum for foreign revolutionaries in the nineteenth century to become the long arm of foreign injustice in the twentieth. He lives in South Hadley, MA.
