In the wake of revelations through the website Wikileaks about torture and U.S. occupied

Iraq, we're revisiting an important conversation I had in 2009.

My guest, Darius Rajali, is one of the world's leading experts on torture.

Its history and effects, human and political, practical and moral.

In his life story and in his scholarship, Darius Rajali knows how torture makes its way

into democracies and how it affects the people and nations who practice it.

From American public media, I'm Krista Tippett, today on Being the Long Shadow of Torture.

Darius Rajali is a professor of political science at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

He's best known as the author of the sweeping, highly acclaimed 2007 book, Torture and Democracy.

His expertise has been sought by legal experts, scholars, and the media, before and since

the Obama administration declassified and released legal memos on torture in April 2009.

These memos were written during the Bush administration and authorize practices that

included waterboarding and the use of insects in cramped confinement boxes.

More recently, Wikileaks released new documentation of American complicity in and proximity

to whipping electric shocks and other abuses by Iraqi forces.

Darius Rajali was raised in pre-revolutionary Iran, with, as he tells it,

an Iranian Shiite father and a Calvinist American mother.

He was also raised with an awareness that a long line of his aristocratic Iranian forebears

had used torture against opponents. Torture was also a known tool of the state apparatus of the

king or Shah who ruled Iran during Darius Rajali's childhood.

When I think back on on my childhood, I think of a history class where

it was mandatory that all Iranians had to take Persian history and we were taught about

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