University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 11-2003 Too Close to the Rack and the Screw: Constitutional Constraints on Torture in the War on Terror Seth F. Kreimer University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, Defense and Security Studies Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Studies Commons, National Security Law Commons, and the Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons Repository Citation Kreimer, Seth F., "Too Close to the Rack and the Screw: Constitutional Constraints on Torture in the War on Terror" (2003). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 1166. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1166 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. TOO CLOSE TO THE RACK AND THE SCREW: CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON TORTURE IN THE WAR ON TERROR Seth F. Kreim INTRODUCTION There are some articles I never thought I would have to write; this is one. Torture has never been a favorite of American law. Whatever the transgressions of street-level bureaucrats,' it has not been a tradition- ally avowed instrument of American policy. 2 However, as the current trope goes, everything has changed after September 11. In the immediate aftermath of that tragedy, law enforcement offi- cials confronted with recalcitrant suspected terrorists let it be known that they were seriously considering resorting to chemical interven- tions and outright physical abuse to obtain information that could aid them in preventing a recurrence.