Michael Otterman is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in New York City and Sydney. He graduated from Boston University, with a BSc in Journalism, and from the University of Sydney with a MLitt(PACS) where he is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS)[1][2]
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In March 2007, his first book American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond was published by Melbourne University Publishing (MUP). He toured, promoting the book from June to October 2007.[3][4] In October 2007, He gave a talk at New York University.[5]
As Dennis Altman wrote in The Age:
Otterman writes as a patriot - one who expects much of his country and is angry when it fails him.[6][7]
Television appearances in 2007 included The Tavis Smiley Show,[8] BBC World News,[9] and JTV, ABC Australia.[10]
Michael Otterman also runs a blog, the americantorture.com which according to its first posting on 16 January 2007, will:
provide a venue for discussions about America's use of torture and feature updates about the fate of the over 10,000 'enemy combatants' and 'security detainees' held across the globe in secret CIA prisons and in places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
He has been active identifying the psychologists, James Mitchell,[11] Bruce Jessen,[12] and Jerald Ogrisseg.[13] The participation of psychologists, and the American Psychological Association's policy on psychologists participating in detainee interrogations are controversial.[14][15][16][17]
He is currently, as of 2010, working on a forthcoming publication Collateral Carnage: The Human Cost of the War in Iraq, coauthored with Dr Richard Hil and Dr Paul Wilson.[1]
As with most things in life, knowing the problem isn't enough. We also have to understand its origins. That's what this book does well. Its strength is its methodical presentation of facts, many of them little known, to build a fresh and informative analysis of the psycho- logy behind President George W. Bush's claim that the United States's torture techniques are an "alternate set of procedures", vital tools needed "to protect the American people and our allies". Michael Otterman, an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, begins his history of torture with the early years of the Cold War when it was believed that communist governments had learned how to control the mind and turn people into human robots. In 1951, when an American journalist was arrested in Czechoslovakia, he very quickly "confessed" to hostile activities and was sentenced to 10 years in jail.[18]
Otterman begins his book with the Cold War, and the ways in which it led to new forms of interrogation and surveillance. American support for successive South Vietnamese governments, another misadventure backed enthusiastically by Australian conservatives, frequently saw "brutal interrogation". Belief in the sheer evil of its Communist opponents justified appalling behaviour by the United States and its allies, just as it does today. Torture is defined as "the infliction of intense pain to body or mind to extract a confession or information, or for sadistic pleasure". This definition comes from a 1992 US army field manual, and closely adheres to the norms of international law.[6]