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Torture and Impunity - The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (Paperback)
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Torture and Impunity - The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (Paperback)
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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 Intelligence 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 11th, 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
simulations 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 powerful who
commanded them, media exposes 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.
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