Talking About Torture: How Political Discourse Shapes the Debate by Jared Del Rosso

One consistent question for human rights advocates is how exactly to affect change through speech acts. In Talking About Torture: How Political Discourse Shapes the Debate, Jared Del Rosso focuses on how language is used to structure arguments both alleging and denying the use of torture by the US government upon persons in its custody. He examines discourse in a single venue, the US Congress, to chart evolution in a human rights debate over time. By analyzing the actors, sources of evidence, frames, and modes of discourse employed in Congressional hearings on instances in which the US government was accused of torturing foreign agents under its control, Del Rosso traces the evolution of debate over the Bush Administration’s use of various detention and interrogation practices between 2001 and 2008. He focuses on several “episodes” of debate: the Metropolitan Detention Centre, Abu Ghraib and the wider network of Afghan and Iraqi detention sites, Guantanamo Bay, and the use of waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation.” …