Witch Hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay. Witch Hunts, Witch Hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay.

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

Robert Rapley is a retired public servant living in Ottawa. He has published an earlier study of European witchcraft trials, and here he combines his knowledge of 17th-century Europe with an examination of more modern cases that hinged on similar public hysteria; the historical examples are then used as the basis for an examination of the War on Terror that Rapley sees as a modern version of witch-hunting.

The historical examples are well done and the modern cases, which range from the Dreyfus affair to the Scottsboro Boys and to British trials of IRA “terrorists,” are tightly written and argued. The volume then focuses on the post-9/11 world and examines American policy in some detail, adding in addition one chapter on the Maher Arar case in Canada. The relatively restrained tone in the first two sections slips in the final one, so much so that the fact that witches did not exist and terrorism does sometimes slips away. That being said, Rapley stands four square for human rights and against torture, and he is right to do so. The new Obama administration appears to agree, and we shall see how and with what success terrorism will be confronted in the coming years.