Juan E. Méndez has a fantastic CV. Mercilessly tortured in Argentina, the country of his birth, when 30, he is now, four decades on, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, in other words, its chief investigator. In between, he has worked for Human Rights Watch for 15 years and been the United Nations First Special Adviser to the Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide.
Why does torture still exist? The author points out the painful truth: that many ordinary people have come to believe it to be not only inevitable but often even desirable. And some regimes try to deny that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, for example — constitute torture at all, thereby lending them legality.
Méndez attacks the American author Alan Dershowitz for defending torture on the grounds of the highly theoretical ‘ticking-bomb’ argument: that there is only one person who is able to prevent a bomb detonating in five minutes’ time.
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