None of Us Were Like This Before: US torture documented

September 2, 2012
Written by Dominic Alexander
Published in Book Reviews

None of Us Were Like This Before, a definitive investigation of the use of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, has now been published in paperback

Joshua E. S. Phillips, None of us were like this before (Verso 2010)

Terror inflicted by drones may have lately overshadowed terror through the torture and abuse of prisoners in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, but in both cases the norms of international law were and are being cast aside with chilling disdain. The torture of prisoners by US (and UK) soldiers was dismissed, predictably, as the product of a few bad apples, but Joshua E. S. Phillips, in None of Us Were Like This Before, documents the systematic nature of the abuse, and is now available in paperback. Reviewed on Counterfire when it came out in hardback, the book shows carefully and unsparingly both the impact on the tortured and the toll it has taken on US troops themselves. None of Us Were Like This Before deserves to be read widely

Read extracts from None of Us Were Like This Before published on Counterfire

Tagged under: War on Terror torture

Dominic Alexander

Dominic Alexander is a member of Counterfire, for which he is the book review editor. He is a longstanding activist in north London. He is a historian whose work includes the book Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (2008), a social history of medieval wonder tales, and articles on London’s first revolutionary, William Longbeard, and the revolt of 1196, in Viator 48:3 (2017), and Science and Society 84:3 (July 2020). He is also the author of the Counterfire book, The Limits of Keynesianism (2018).