How the Gloves Came Off: Lawyers, Policy Makers, and Norms in the Debate on Torture (Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare) by Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault is a book every American should read. This book dives into the subject of how America let torture become normal. Torture is against all of America's values yet torture became normal for a great deal of time, and maybe still going on. Why and how is addressed in this book. It is a gut-retching and face-slapping, eye-widing book book we all need to read to keep this from happening again (?), expanding...esp with the White House we have now. This White House says they want to kill all the family of terrorist too, women and children too, what kind of torture would they use if they could? This really frightens me.

Arsenault opens the book with an excellent and thorough survey of the history of the norms that have governed POWs in American conflicts since our founding. I found that the most interesting part of the book because the rest is contemporary enough I was already clued into the conversation a bit.

Her argument in the rest of the book is equally well informed though. Any look into the Bush Administration is gonna be really good at getting your blood boiling. This is no exception. And reading this book after the 2016 Election really brings into stark relief how dangerous eroding norms can be. I found this book, if not necessary reading, part of a necessary education in the mechanisms of history. Stay vigilant. Stay really f*&%ing vigilant.

Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault's "How the Gloves Came Off" reexamines the George W. Bush administration's policy on enhanced interrogations (i.e., "torture") through the lens of constructivism. This is a book about international relations theory and how norms change. As she demonstrates, the Bush administration's policies represented a major shift from previous administrations. Although the US had not always implemented the Geneva Conventions perfectly, never before had an administration claimed that they simply didn't apply.

Arsenault demonstrates the extent to which norms about prisoner interrogations shifted by comparing the Global War on Terror with the Vietnam War. Although the two wars were different in important ways, this turns out to be an extremely useful comparison because they both involved detention and interrogation of individuals who do not fit the conventional definition of "combatant" under international law (the Viet Cong in the latter case). In Vietnam, the Johnson administration chose to adhere to the Geneva Conventions even though it realized it could probably make a legal argument for why they didn't apply to the Viet Cong. It did so primarily for policy reasons (e.g., to win hearts and minds).

By contrast, Arsenault shows that the Bush administration went to great lengths to argue not just that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, but also that the president alone had legal authority to determine U.S. policy on interrogations. Administration lawyers and policymakers saw interrogations as one front in a larger struggle to reclaim executive power. They viewed the "lawyering up" at national security agencies during the 1990s as unduly hampering their effectiveness. Arsenault examines the role of lawyers, policymakers, and implementers (i.e., the individuals who carried out the interrogations) to see the extent to which contributed to the shift in norms. She finds that, contrary to the administration's claims, torture and abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were not simply the result of a "few bad apples," but rather the result of the norm shift pushed by senior lawyers and policymakers.

Arsenault provides compelling evidence that the shift in norms on interrogations was not merely a response to the shock of 9/11. She also takes care to point out that the Bush administration itself was not a unitary actor. Different policymakers viewed enhanced interrogations differently. Nonetheless, although Arsenault comes across as quite critical of torture, this is not a book about the morality or effectiveness of torture. She only touches upon those debates tangentially. Instead, "How the Gloves Came Off" focuses on why policymakers and lawyers even viewed it as acceptable.

Recommended for readers interested in international relations and modern American history.