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“A fascinating and disturbing book, providing the most
authoritative account of torture yet available and
conforming to the best traditions of scholarship.”
—Richard Falk, Princeton University
Campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama offered an
impassioned denunciation of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques
used by the Bush administration in its War on Terror—methods that
included sensory deprivation, self-inflicted pain, and waterboarding.
But four years later America has yet to prosecute or punish these
abuses. Tracing the origins of this knotty contradiction from the 1950s
to the present, Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural
dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of
the U.S. government under presidents Bush and Obama.
During the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. Central Intelli-
gence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to
weaken a subject’s resistance to interrogation. For many of those
subjected to these experiments, the result was an experience akin to
psychosis. Leaving its most lasting scars on the psyche rather than the
body, such torture lent itself to propagation, and for three decades the
U.S. shared these methods with its anti-Communist allies around the
globe. After the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001,
the CIA opened its own prisons, and American agents began, for the
first time, to dirty their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming.
Simultaneously, mass media offered enticing, often eroticized simula-
tions of torture in film, television, and computer games that normalized
this illegal practice for millions of Americans.
In the absence of legal sanction for the perpetrators or the power-
ful who commanded them, media exposés and congressional hearings
have proved insufficient deterrents. The American public, preoccupied
with the nation’s failing economy, has seemingly moved on. But the
images of abuse from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are seared into
human memory, doing lasting damage to America’s moral authority as
a world leader.
s the J.R.W. Smail Profes-
sor of History at the University of Wisconsin–
Madison. His many books include
Policing
America’s Empire
and
A Question of Torture.
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
• SPRING 2012 •
Politics / History / Human Rights
1
July 2012
LC: 2011043916 HV
298 pp. 6 x 9 13 b/w illus.
Paper $24.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-28854-9
e-book $14.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-28853-2
Winner of the Kahin Prize for Southeast Asian Studies
The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of
the Surveillance State
Alfred W. McCoy
N
EW
P
ERSPECTIVES IN
S
OUTHEAST
A
SIAN
S
TUDIES
“This remarkable study provides a meticulous analysis of the novel colonial system
developed by the U.S. in the Philippines after the murderous conquest, with startling
implications for the shape of the modern world.”—Noam Chomsky
Copublished with Ateneo de Manila Press.
In the Philippines, order from Ateneo.
Published October 2009
LC: 2009010253 DS 672 pp. 6 x 9 47 b/w photos, 7 illus.
ISBN 978-0-299-23414-0 Paper $29.95 t ISBN 978-0-299-23413-3 e-book $14.95 t
C
RITICAL
H
UMAN
R
IGHTS
Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus, Series Editors
• McCoy’s earlier book,
A Question of Torture
,
has sold more than 15,000 copies worldwide.
PAPERBACK
ORIGINAL
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