Notes Toward an Essay on Torture: The Mother Lode

A commenter to a post last month on TalkLeft points us to the Winter 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy, where we can find the article "Cruel Science: CIA Torture & U.S. Foreign Policy" by Alfred W. McCoy. The 54-page article can be found as a .PDF on the journal's Web site.

Some people, in expressing their outrage about the Abu Ghurayb photographs, have insisted that "Americans don't torture." McCoy reminds us that this has not been true, not since the end of the Second World War.

McCoy's paper both provides exhaustive detail about interrogations at Abu Ghurayb and the unfolding of the scandal and places the scandal in the context of the CIA's half-century record of researching and implementing interrogation methods and teaching these methods to intelligence and police agencies of US partners and allies. I'm relieved to find all this information pulled together in one place: that's a big chunk of research I don't have to try do do myself.