The older gentleman with a disappearing hairline and pincer-like cheeks hollowed to spend words in sparing, deliberate tones, answered the question about Abu Ghraib:


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     “In September of 2003, General [Ricardo] Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army Field Manual 3452, and …

     “[I]f you look at those techniques, what he’s ordering, in essence, is a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions and sensory disorientation, and …

     “[I]f you look at the 1963 C.I.A. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, and …

     “[If] you look at the 1983 C.I.A. Interrogation Training Manual that they used in Honduras for training Honduran officers in torture and interrogation, and then twenty years later …

      “[If] you look at General Sanchez’s 2003 orders, and …

     “[If you see that] there’s a striking continuity across this forty-year span, in both the general principles, this total assault on the existential platforms of human identity and existence, okay? and …

     “[You will see] the specific techniques, the way of achieving that, through the attack on these sensory receptors.”


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This morning, like me, you may have seen Prof. Alfred McCoy on Democracy Now!. It’s fitting that the man who wrote the books on CIA interrogation methods, government-run international heroin trafficking, the use of unknowing guinea pigs in drug experiments, and much more, should appear in the same week as the new images and videos from Abu Ghraib showing more evidence of torture, humiliation, and the loss of humanity by both guards and their victims.


I was curious when Amy Goodman mentioned that this University of Wisconsin professor had been the target of CIA mercenary assassins, so I did some checking … here’s what I found:


Apparently Prof. McCoy is still trying to find out. This is from a 1997 Congressional hearing, “CIA Covert Actions and Drug Trafficking,” held by Rep. John Conyers:

Al McCoy: Since 1990 I’ve been trying to get my own file from the CIA. The CIA mercenaries tried to assassinate me when the Deputy Director of Plans tried to suppress my book I assume this left a fairly substantial trail. I’ve had a wonderful correspondence with an ever so polite and nice guy whom I’m sure we’d have a wonderful dinner, just as I’m sure I’ll never get my documents. This is now going into its seventh year of correspondence. I think this is significant in terms of the current debate because the fragment, the extract that I quoted in my presentation earlier about CIA full knowledge of the participation of their Laotian allies and assets in drug traffic is a tiny fragment buried at the back end of the old Church Committee investigation of CIA assassinations in a little footnotes that make other oblique references to this very substantial report that the CIA Inspector General did in 1972. He interviewed maybe 20+ people in Langley and maybe a hundred people in the field. I’ve never seen this report. I don’t think the American public has seen this report. In light of the current controversy over CIA intentionality, knowledge and condoning drug traffic, it’s certainly time for this report to come out. It cannot have any possible operational implications. (Read all of the testimony.)


Last September, Tom Engelhardt of the popular blog, TomDispatch issued a Tomgram: “Alfred McCoy on the CIA’s road to Abu Ghraib.” … below

Around the world — and in the United States — Abu Ghraib has become a byword for our disastrous war in Iraq. The photos of torture, abuses, and humiliations of every sort that e-seeped out of that prison shocked Iraqis, the world, and many Americans. But as is so often the case, images can’t be fully interpreted without context. Below, Alfred McCoy, who in the Vietnam era wrote The Politics of Heroin, a now-classic exposé of Central Intelligence Agency tactics in Southeast Asia, and has been on the Agency’s case every since, offers the necessary — and shocking — historical context. He fills us in on a truly shameful story most of us remember, if at all, only in bits and pieces (those Agency experiments with LSD, for instance): A taxpayer-funded CIA, using up to a billion dollars a year for its research, plunged into a universe of torture way back in the 1950s and emerged with a new set of “no-touch” torture techniques which were then codified in manuals, used in Vietnam, and for over two decades taught to allied police forces and militaries around the Third World. It turns out that many of these techniques, some over half-a-century old, have just been paraded before our eyes in the Abu Ghraib snapshots. In other words, the now infamous photos were evidence, for those who could interpret them, of CIA-influence in Abu Ghraib (as the recent report by Major General George R. Fay has confirmed)….


[Below this and the rest of the introduction, Tom Engelhardt prints “The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America’s Road to Abu Ghraib,” written by Alfred McCoy.]


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