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The Seventh Star of the Confederacy
Anasazi America
Low Mountains or High Tea
Beggar Thy Neighbor
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Changing the Rules of Engagement
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Five Four Whiskey
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Torture and ImpunityTorture and Impunity

The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

Alfred W. McCoy

Narrated by David Halliburton

Available from Audible


Book published by University of Wisconsin Press


Many Americans have condemned the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human rights. But the United States has done almost nothing to prosecute past abuses or prevent future violations. Tracing this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, historian Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government.





During the Cold War, McCoy argues, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to weaken a subject’s resistance to interrogation. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the CIA revived these harsh methods, while U.S. media was flooded with seductive images that normalized torture for many Americans. Ten years later, the U.S. had failed to punish the perpetrators or the powerful who commanded them, and continued to exploit intelligence extracted under torture by surrogates from Somalia to Afghanistan. Although Washington has publicly distanced itself from torture, disturbing images from the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are seared into human memory, doing lasting damage to America’s moral authority as a world leader.

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. His many books include Policing America’s Empire and A Question of Torture.

REVIEWS:

“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

“This book gives the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about the use of torture by the United States intelligence service.”

—Jennifer Harbury, author of Truth, Torture, and the American Way

“McCoy, our finest thinker on the issue of torture, describes its legalization under Bush and the damage caused to morality, law, and our future by Obama's granting of impunity to the torturers. Readers will come away with the understanding that the United States' commitment to human rights was tested by 9/11—and it failed.”

—Michael Ratner, president emeritus, Center for Constitutional Rights





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