Torture Town

In this adventure by the bestselling authors of The Eyes of Texas, an Old West mountain man plays peacemaker in a lethal family feud. Reared by adventurer Smoke Jensen in the pristine Western wilderness, he has no home, no destination. Matt Jensen is William W. Johnstone’s legendary creation—a man with survival and justice in his blood. More Vicious Than The Hatfields And The McCoys… In the town of Thirty-Four Corners, Colorado, Matt Jensen rides into a savage blood feud. Thirty years ago, two friends came West and built a thriving cattle business. Now, their families have become kill-crazy enemies and the town is awash in a frenzy of murder. Add in hired gunmen on both sides of the fight, and two lovers crossing the dividing line, and the terror will never end. Eager to put as many miles between himself and Thirty-Four Corners, Matt Jensen just can’t bring himself to leave without trying to stop the bloodshed. But it’s going to take a lot more bullets, just as many bodies, and the steely courage of an intrepid frontiersman to let this ravaged town live again…

The sixth rip-roaring book in the "USA Today"-bestselling Matt Jensen series, featuring a hero who lives by the gun and surrenders to no one. Original.

I will put you down myself. The Torture Princess has fulfilled her duty, and the fourteen demon contractors have been laid low. Yet, when the time comes for Elisabeth to burn-forsaken by heaven, earth, and all of humanity-the fifteenth demon contractor, Kaito Sena, host of the Kaiser, appears and declares himself the enemy of mankind. In light of this, Elisabeth receives a new lease on life as the heartrending task of hunting him down is forced upon her. Now on the run, Kaito and Hina find themselves in the company of beastfolk who wish to "receive the enemy of mankind as an honored guest." They are not without their own share of problems, however. Someone has been slaughtering their kin in the most gruesome ways imaginable. If Kaito's instincts are correct, these killings could be the work only of demons. But the demons have been dealt with...Haven't they?

Originally published as part IV of Lea's Superstition and Force, this volume is one of the most succinct accounts in English of the place of torture in the legal process from the Roman Empire to the nineteenth century.

"Torture has ceased to exist," Victor Hugo claimed, with some justification, in 1874. Yet more than a century later, torture is used routinely in one out of every three countries. This book is about torture in Western society from earliest times to the present. A landmark study since its original publication a decade ago, Torture is now available in an expanded and updated paperback edition. Included for the first time is a broad and disturbing selection of documents charting the historical practice of torture from the ancient Romans to the Khmer Rouge.

With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s political machine, from aldermen to the mayor’s office. [TAYLOR’s BOOK] takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed—through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department’s “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.

Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture, Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide. The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every confession in the torture chamber. Their transcripts reveal that Inquisitors used torture deliberately and meticulously, unlike the rash, improvised methods used by the United States after 9/11. In their relentless pursuit of underground Jewish communities in Spain and Mexico, the Inquisition tortured in cold blood. But they treated any information extracted with caution: torture was used to test information provided through other means, not to uncover startling new evidence. Hassner's findings in Anatomy of Torture have important implications for ongoing torture debates. Rather than insist that torture is ineffective, torture critics should focus their attention on the morality of torture. If torture is evil, its efficacy is irrelevant. At the same time, torture defenders cannot advocate for torture as a counterterrorist "quick fix": torture has never located, nor will ever locate, the hypothetical "ticking bomb" that is frequently invoked to justify brutality in the name of security.

Violent Accounts presents a compelling study of how ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative analysis of perpetrator testimony, the volume reveals the individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. The analysis of perpetrator testimony covers all tiers on the hierarchy of organized violence, from executives who translated political doctrine into general strategies, to managers who translated these general strategies into specific plans, to the staff—the foot soldiers—who carried out the destructive plans of these managers. Vivid and accessible, Violent Accounts is a work of innovative scholarship that transcends the particulars of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reveal broader themes and unexpected insights about perpetrators of collective violence, the confrontations between victims and perpetrators in the aftermath of this violence, the reality of multiple truths, the complexities of reconciliation, and lessons of restorative justice.

Argues that there are moral grounds to use torture where the lives of the innocent are at stake.