;)
American Methods | Praise
"In horrifyingly impeccable detail, author Kristian Williams argues that US policymaking, even before Sept. 11, actually pivots on the use of torture. He shows how US torture tactics in Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, Afghanistan, and US prisons are strikingly similar, employing systematized racism, misogyny, and rape ... American Methods cogently gives the reader evidence of how the US uses torture to control society and to protect US hegemony, compelling us to rethink power and to question the terror enacted in the name of democracy."
—ColorLines
“Kristian Williams peels away the mythic veneer of American Innocence
with an eloquence, power, and precision that stands largely unrivaled. The result
is a book which not only deserves, but quite literally demands inclusion among
the handful of works essential to understanding where it is we find ourselves
at this awful moment in history. Read it if you dare, and especially if you
don’t.”
—Ward Churchill, author of A Little Matter of Genocide
and On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
“American Methods shines an unmediated light on this country’s
use of torture as an essential component of social control, both at home and
abroad. Williams’s exhaustive analysis exposes a history of routine brutality
in US police, military, and prison interrogation practices. He deftly makes
the case that the Abu Ghraib scandal was not an aberrant experiment conducted
by a handful of rogue soldiers but part of a long-standing national tradition.
An important, thoroughly well-researched and superbly written critique.”
—Tara Herivel, Seattle-based prisoners’ attorney and editor
of Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor
“Kristian Williams has done it again. As in his previous work, Our
Enemies in Blue (2004), Williams brings a wealth of research to bear on
his thinking, his analysis, and his writing … He deftly demonstrates the
links between torture abroad and torture at home–and the American way
of sensationalizing separate events, which blinds us to the ubiquity of this
practice, every day, all across the nation. … American Methods
isn’t pretty. It isn’t for the faint-hearted. But this is not a
time for the faint-hearted. It is a time of trial, a time of strife, a time
of near-apocalyptic danger. It is time for American Methods.”
—Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of We Want Freedom
Return to American Methods