A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (American Empire Project) [Paperback]

In this remarkable book, Alfred McCoy, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gives `the hidden history of torture inside the U.S. intelligence community over the past half century'. He describes the "distinctive U.S. covert-warfare doctrine developed since World War II, in which psychological torture has emerged as a central if clandestine facet of American foreign policy."

He explains, "the CIA's psychological paradigm fused two new methods, `sensory disorientation' and `self-inflicted pain'. The Red Cross says these psychological methods are `tantamount to torture', `a form of torture'. The US state publicly defends the techniques, denying that they amount to torture.

This innovation came from "allied behavioural research that made psychological torture NATO's secret weapon against communism and cognitive science the handmaiden of state security." He shows how, "From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually."

The CIA's 1963 Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook has defined its interrogation methods and training programs throughout the world. Between 1962 and 1974, the CIA trained more than one million policemen from 47 countries across the world, including South Vietnam, Brazil, Iran and the Philippines. British forces also used these interrogation techniques in, among other colonial wars, the British Cameroons (1960-61), Brunei (1963), British Guiana (1964), Aden (1964-67), Malaysia (1965-66) and Northern Ireland (1969-77).

In 2001, Bush `suspended' the Geneva Conventions and authorised torture. He told the White House counterterrorism chief, "Any barriers in your way, they are gone. ... I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." The CIA's counterterrorism chief told Congress, "All you need to know" about "very highly classified ... operational flexibility is that there was a `before 9/11' and there was an `after 9/11'. After 9/11, the gloves came off." The White House has fought in courts and Congress "to preserve executive prerogatives of arbitrary arrest, unrestrained interrogation, and endless incarceration ... as permanent executive powers in any case of national security."

McCoy quotes Tom Parker, a former MI5 agent, "The U.S. is doing what the British did in the 1970s, detaining people and violating their civil liberties. It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. Most of those interned went back to terrorism. You'll end up radicalizing the entire population."

As McCoy writes, "the photographs from Iraq illustrate standard interrogation practice inside the global gulag of secret CIA prisons that have operated, on executive authority, since the start of the war on terror." There are 41,000 detainees in Iraq, 1,100 detainees are being systematically tortured at Guantanamo and Bagram, there have been at least 150 extraordinary renditions to, for example, Uzbekistan and Morocco, and at least 94 detainees have been killed.

This is not `abuse' by `rotten apples', but government-sanctioned systematic torture. As the New York Times editorialised on 18 March 2005, "The atrocities that occurred in prisons like Abu Ghraib were the product of decisions that began at the very top, when the Bush administration decided that Sept. 11 had wiped out its responsibilities to abide by the rules, including the Geneva Conventions and the American Constitution."

Torture is illegal, immoral and impractical. It is counter-productive; a regime that tortures loses support. The New York Times noted on 5 June 2005 that Guantanamo was `a national shame' and `a highly effective recruiting tool for Islamic radicals, including future terrorists'. As McCoy records, "Torture introduced to defend the shah had instead destroyed the shah." And, "With surprising speed, Washington's recourse to torture in the hunt for Al Qaeda replicated the same outcome first seen during its `dirty war' in Vietnam - anger among the local population and alienation of the American people from the larger war effort."

I don't really write reviews but this book was so brilliant that i thought that i better speak up for it.

Naturally, the only people who will ever buy and read this book are those who know 'the score' already. This then, assumes that you are already sufficiently enlightened and therefore decides not to lecture. All that the book gives is facts and evidence, thanks to McCoy's rigorous research and obvious passion.

I have a million books covering the big 'what happened to the American Dream' question. This is one of the best.

One final thought, it's a hard back so you can take the cover off to avoid looking like an attention seeker when reading on the bus. Helpful.

After reading this book I bought "Das Experiment. " An accompanying piece of social commentary to this, as is Kafka's "The Trial."

The core of the analysis exists in the other reviews. McCoy dissects torture, taking the rationale for inflicting it on people and slowly strangles the life out of the belief system with thorough detailed analysis

The seeming guardian of liberal values beefed up the programme; JFK. An analysis connecting to Chomsky. Camelot was similar to the court at Versailles pre 1789. Replete with self preening pomp, whilst the serious business of colonies and the destruction of the poor was enacted in some other quarter of the world.

Yuri Gargarin orbiting and the Communist Show Trials of American prisoners in Korea, created a thunderbolt of fright throughout the American security services. Paranoid officials feared the encirclement by Communism, 5th columnists were everywhere. Paranoia runs deep in the USA; lynching, knee scraping to their invisible deity, flying saucer attacks, Pinkos, Communists and now moslems. A herd has massed under a flag of conformity. To keep the masses satiated an outside inside enemy has to be created, thereby keeping the nation bound together as one.

Vietnam took the brunt of the grunt in the 60's, deemed as the double six in the domino pack the USA sent in the Texas Rangers to clear out the Red hostiles and make the world safe for Cheeseburgers. This of course included the mass use of chemical weapons, napalm and Agent Orange. Search and Destroy were euphemisms for extending the body count, a strategy used in the WW1 to justify the slaughter. Kids and women were gunned en masse and the men lifted via Operation Phoenix into torture chambers.

Meanwhle back in the prestigious colleges Psychology and Psychiatry, the most bogus of professions endeared themselves to their paymasters by coming up with more extensive interrogation techniques based on destroying the psyche. Information was secondary. Leaving the equivalent of a head on a spike was what was needed to scare the natives into buying Bruce Springsteen and Die Hard 5. Chattering psychotic ex captives served this purpose of terror. In Vietnam there was also a policy of pump and dump.

The result of course is that it created a resistance, something not acknowledged by preening egoistical academics. They have a vested interest in proving otherwise. America lost its moral highground and was perceived as just another grubby nation of exploitative couchons in the trough of eternal delights.

Free enterprise is another ideology like capitalism foisted onto nations to extract their dollars. The question which needs to be asked given the tally of wars across the globe, who has the higher body count? The States, the Muslims or the Commies?