Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shows brilliantly how torture is immoral, counter-productive and corrupting, 27 Sep 2006
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."
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
5 Stars, 11 Jul 2008
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.
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