Alfred McCoy, renowned historian and author of
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the International Drug Trade has a new book out which I highly recommend.
It's called A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.
I was lucky enough to be assigned a story on the book and its author for Isthmus, my local alternative weekly.*
More on the flip.
Dr. McCoy got involved in torture while researching the downfall of Ferdinand Marcos. He found the colonels who engineered that coup were well-versed and very willing to discuss their methods of psychological torture. Fifteen years of research taught Dr. McCoy that the CIA invented and perfected psychological torture at the end of the Cold War, then taught people the world over - the French in Algiera, The Filipinos, the South Vietnamese, the Hondurans, etc, etc - how to do it. Dr. McCoy walked away in 2000, because he just couldn't handle it any more.
But when he saw the photos from Abu Ghraib, he knew immediately that this wasn't done by "bad apples" or "creeps." Here's what he told me when I interviewed him:
"When I saw that iconic photograph of the Iraqi standing on the box, hooded, with arms extended ... I looked at that photograph and said, 'That's it,'" says McCoy, 60. "That's not what William Saffire called 'creeps.' The bad apples. I looked at it and said, 'Nope.' Hooded for sensory disorientation. Arms extended for self-inflicted pain. Textbook, by-the-book psychological torture. They've either been trained in it, they've mimed it informally because they're working with people who are doing it, or they have orders to do it."
The book gives a history of psychological torture (including the psychological experiments in sensory deprivation), picks apart the memos from Gonzales and Bybee justifying it, and explains why it does not work.
Of particular significance to me is a speculation of my own. The FBI learned from the Marine Corps during WWII that building rapport and intimacy with a subject works. The Marines got complete order-of-battle intelligence inside of 24 hours essentially by being nice to Japanese POWs, who were supposed to be fanatically devoted to the emporer. Fifty years later, the FBI had Al Queda leader Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi in November 2002 and was in the process of extracting a confession that would hold up in court. On orders from the White House, the CIA took over, took him to Egypt to be tortured, and then, just to end the pain, he gave FALSE information implicating Iraq, which Colin Powell then used in his address to the UN.
I think they did that on purpose. I think they wanted Iraq, so a truthful confession would do no good. They needed to torture the guy until he gave them the lie they needed.
McCoy declined to speculate, calling the implication of Iraq an "unplanned consequence." But, he says, "It did work out well for them."
The book is not partisan. It's critical of the Bush administration, but not partisan. It implicates Clinton and McCoy told me Abu Ghraib, or something like it, would have happened in a Gore administration.
Anyway. Get the book. Read it.
* For those Madisonians in the crowd, watch for it on Feb. 2.