Professor McCoy Exposes the History of CIA Interrogation, From the
Cold War to the War on Terror

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We now take a look at what lies behind the shocking images of torture
at Abu Ghraib prison by turning to the history of the CIA and torture
techniques. Professor Alfred McCoy talks about his book "A Question of
Torture", a startling expose of the CIA development of psychological
torture from the Cold War to Abu Ghraib. CIA mercenaries attempted to
assassinate McCoy more than 30 years ago. [includes rush transcript]
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We now take a look at what lies behind the shocking images of torture
at Abu Ghraib by turning to the history of the CIA and torture
techniques. The International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty
International and other human rights groups say the recently released
images of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib show a clear
violation of international humanitarian law. The U.S. made a pledge
against torture when Congress ratified the UN Convention Against
Torture in 1994 - but it was ratified with reservations that exempted
the CIA's psychological torture method. So what were the results?
A new expose gives an account of the CIA's secret efforts to develop
new forms of torture spanning fifty years. It reveals how the CIA
perfected its methods, distributing them across the world from Vietnam
to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo torture scandals. The book is titled "A Question of
Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror."

Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. Author of "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the
Cold War to the War on Terror" and also "The Politics of Heroin: CIA
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade."

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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: A new expose gives an account of the C.I.A.'s secret
efforts to develop new forms of torture, spanning half a century. It
reveals how the C.I.A. perfected its methods, distributing them across
the world, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the
roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals. The book is
called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War
to the War on Terror, and we're joined by its author, Alfred McCoy,
professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We
welcome you to Democracy Now!

ALFRED McCOY: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: And glad to have you with us, especially in light of your
history. I first learned of you with your first book The Politics of
Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, for which you
almost died. What happened then?

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, when I was researching that book in the mountains of
Laos, hiking from village to village, interviewing Laotian farmers
about their opium harvest, and they were telling me that they took it
down to the local helicopter pad where Air America helicopters would
land, Air America being a subsidiary of the C.I.A., and officers,
tribal officers in the C.I.A.'s secret army would buy the opium and
fly it off to the C.I.A.'s secret compound, where it would be
transformed into heroin and ultimately wound up in South Vietnam. And
while I was doing that research, hiking from village to village,
interviewing farmers, we were ambushed by a group of C.I.A.
mercenaries. Fortunately, I had five militiamen from the village with
me, and we shot our way out of there, but they came quite close. Then
later on, a C.I.A. operative threatened to murder my interpreter
unless I stopped doing that research. And then when --

AMY GOODMAN: How did you know they were C.I.A.?

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, look, in the mountains of Laos, there aren't that
many white guys, okay? I mean, the mercenaries? First of all, the
C.I.A. ran what was called the "Army Clandestine." They had a secret
army, and those soldiers that ambushed us were soldiers in the secret
army. That, we knew.

AMY GOODMAN: The Laotian army?

ALFRED McCOY: The C.I.A.'s secret army.

AMY GOODMAN: The Laotian mercenaries?

ALFRED McCOY: Laotian mercenaries. That, everybody was clear about
that. Nobody denied that. They said it was sort of an accident, but,
no, it was very clear that it was intentional. And ultimately, when
the book was in press, the head of covert operations for the C.I.A.
called up my offices and my publisher in New York and suggested that
the publisher suppress the book. They then got the right to prior
review -- the publisher compromised.

AMY GOODMAN: C.I.A. prior review.

ALFRED McCOY: Prior review of the manuscript, and they issued a 14-
page critique. The publisher's legal department, HarperCollins's legal
department reviewed the critique, reviewed the manuscript, published
the book unchanged, not a word changed.

AMY GOODMAN: And the contention of that book was that the C.I.A. was
complicit in the global drug trade?

ALFRED McCOY: Right. In the context of conducting covert operations
around the globe, particularly in the Asian opium zone, which
stretched from the Golden Triangle of Vietnam and Laos all the way to
Afghanistan, that in those mountains far away from home, when the
C.I.A. had to mobilize tribal armies, the only allies were warlords,
and when the C.I.A. formed an alliance with them, the warlords used
this alliance to become drug lords, and the C.I.A. didn't stop them
from their involvement in the traffic.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, as a professor at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, you have not stopped looking at the C.I.A., and now you've
written this new book. It's called A Question of Torture: C.I.A.
Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Give us a
history lesson.

ALFRED McCOY: Well, if you look at the most famous of photographs from
Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a
hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, okay?
In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A.
torture. It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and
his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two
very simple fundamental C.I.A. techniques, developed at enormous
cost.

veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a
year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass
persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And
what they discovered -- they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they
tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium
pentathol. None of it worked. What worked was very simple behavioral
findings, outsourced to our leading universities -- Harvard,
Princeton, Yale and McGill -- and the first breakthrough came at
McGill. And it's in the book. And here, you can see the -- this is the
-- if you want show it, you can. That graphic really shows -- that's
the seminal C.I.A. experiment done in Canada and McGill University --

AMY GOODMAN: Describe it.

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, it's very simple. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill
University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian
Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this
research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an
individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum,
beating or pain. All he did was had student volunteers sit in a
cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they
were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory
stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately
breakdown.

And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They
show people with bags over their head. If you look at the photographs
of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those
student volunteers in Dr. Hebb's original cubicle.

Now, then the second major breakthrough that the C.I.A. had came here
in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two
eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet
K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the most effective
K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody
stand for a day or two. And as they stand -- okay, you're not beating
them, they have no resentment -- you tell them, "You're doing this to
yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down." And so, as they
stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs
swell, lesions form, they erupt, they suppurate, hallucinations start,
the kidneys shut down.

Now, if you look at the other aspect of those photos, you'll see that
they're short-shackled -- okay? -- that they're long-shackled, that
they're made -- several of those photos you just showed, one of them
with a man with a bag on his arm, his arms are straight in front of
him, people are standing with their arms extended, that's self-
inflicted pain. And the combination of those two techniques -- sensory
disorientation and self-inflicted pain -- is the basis of the C.I.A.'s
technique.

AMY GOODMAN: Who has pioneered this at the C.I.A.?

ALFRED McCOY: This was done by Technical Services Division. Most of
the in-house research involved drugs and all of the LSD experiments
that we heard about for years, but ultimately they were a negative
result. When you have any large massive research project, you get --
you hit dead ends, you hit brick walls, you get negative results. All
the drugs didn't work. What did work was this.

AMY GOODMAN: But when you talk about the 'everyone knows the LSD
experiments,' I don't think everyone knows. In fact, I would
conjecture that more than 90%% of Americans don't know that the C.I.A.
was involved with LSD experiments on unwitting Americans. Can you
explain what they did?

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, sure. As a part of this comprehensive survey of
human consciousness, the C.I.A. tried every possible techniques. And
one of the things that they -- at the time that this research started
in the 1940s, a Swiss pharmaceutical company developed LSD.

AMY GOODMAN: Which one?

ALFRED McCOY: I forget now. One of the major Swiss pharmaceutical
companies. And Dr. Hoffman there was the man who developed it. The
C.I.A. bought substantial doses, and they conducted experiments. One
of the most notorious experiments was that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, inside
the agency, spiked the drinks of his co-workers, and one of those co-
workers suffered a breakdown, Dr. Frank Olson, and he either was -- I
don't know whether he was pushed or jumped from a hotel here in New
York City --

AMY GOODMAN: His son has never stopped pursuing this case?

ALFRED McCOY: Right, his son Eric Olson insists that his father was
murdered by the C.I.A. Eric Olson believes that his father did a tour
of Europe, and he visited the ultimate Anglo-American test site, black
site near Frankfurt, where they were doing lethal experiments, fatal
experiments, on double agents and suspected double agents, and that
his father returned enormously upset by the discovery that this
research was actually killing people, and that, therefore, Eric Olson
argues his father was killed by the C.I.A., that he was pushed.

AMY GOODMAN: And didn't they do experiments in brothels in the San
Francisco area?

ALFRED McCOY: They had two kind of party houses. They had one in the
San Francisco Bay Area, another in New York City. And what they did in
San Francisco was they had prostitutes who go out to the streets, get
individuals, bring them back, give them a drink, and there would be a
two-way mirror, and the C.I.A. would photograph these people.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the C.I.A. were running the brothel.

ALFRED McCOY: They were running the brothel. They were running all of
these experiments, okay? They did that on Army soldiers through the
Army Chemical Warfare Division.

AMY GOODMAN: What did they do there?

ALFRED McCOY: Again, they gave them LSD and other drugs to see what
effect they would have.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did the soldiers think they were getting?

ALFRED McCOY: They were just told they were participating in an
experiment for national defense.

AMY GOODMAN: Prisoners?

ALFRED McCOY: No, these were --

AMY GOODMAN: Right, but also on prisoners, were there experiments?

ALFRED McCOY: There were some in prisons in the United States and also
the Drug Treatment Center in Lexington, Kentucky. The Federal Drug
Treatment Center in Lexington, Kentucky, had this. All of this
research, all this very elaborate research --

AMY GOODMAN: On unwitting Americans?

ALFRED McCOY: Unwitting Americans, produced nothing, okay? What they
found time and time again is that electroshock didn't work, and sodium
pentathol didn't work, LSD certainly didn't work. You scramble the
brain. You got unreliable information. But what did work was the
combination of these two rather boring, rather mundane behavioral
techniques: sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain.

And in 1963, the C.I.A. codified these results in the so-called KUBARK
Counterintelligence Manual. If you just type the word "KUBARK" into
Google, you will get the manual, an actual copy of it, on your
computer screen, and you can read the techniques [Read the report. But
if you do, read the footnotes, because that's where the behavioral
research is. Now, this produced a distinctively American form of
torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in
centuries, psychological torture, and it's the one that's with us
today, and it's proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an
enormously destructive paradigm.

Let's make one thing clear. Americans refer to this often times in
common parlance as "torture light." Psychological to torture, people
who are involved in treatment tell us it's far more destructive, does
far more lasting damage to the human psyche than does physical
torture. As Senator McCain said, himself, last year when he was
debating his torture prohibition, faced with a choice between being
beaten and psychologically tortured, I'd rather be beaten. Okay? It
does far more lasting damage. It is far crueler than physical torture.
This is something that we don't realize in this country.

Now, another thing we see is those photographs is the psychological
techniques, but the initial research basically developed techniques
for attacking universal human sensory receptors: sight, sound, heat,
cold, sense of time. That's why all of the detainees describe being
put in dark rooms, being subjected to strobe lights, loud music, okay?
That's sensory deprivation or sensory assault. Okay, that was sort of
the phase one of the C.I.A. research. But the paradigm has proved to
be quite adaptable.

Now, one of the things that Donald Rumsfeld did, right at the start of
the war of terror, in late 2002, he appointed General Geoffrey Miller
to be chief at Guantanamo, alright, because the previous commanders at
Guantanamo were too soft on the detainees, and General Miller turned
Guantanamo into a de facto behavioral research laboratory, a kind of
torture research laboratory. And under General Miller at Guantanamo,
they perfected the C.I.A. torture paradigm. They added two key
techniques. They went beyond the universal sensory receptors of the
original research. They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity,
particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual
identity.

And then they went further still. Under General Miller, they created
these things called "Biscuit" teams, behavioral science consultation
teams, and they actually had qualified military psychologists
participating in the ongoing interrogation, and these psychologists
would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or attachment to
mother, and by the time we're done, by 2003, under General Miller,
Guantanamo had perfected the C.I.A. paradigm, and it had a three-fold
total assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted
pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they sent General Miller to, quote, "Gitmo-ize"
Abu Ghraib. Professor McCoy, we're going to break for a minute, and
then we'll come back. Professor Alfred McCoy, professor of history at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His latest book is called A
Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the
War on Terror.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Alfred McCoy, professor of history at
the University of Wisconsin, Madison, author of a number of books. The
Politics of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity in the Global Drug Trade almost
had him killed. Afterwards, the C.I.A. tried to have the book
squelched, but ultimately it was published. Then A Question of
Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation from the Cold War to the War On Terror
is his latest book, and we're talking about the history of torture.
Continue with what you were saying, talking about the Biscuit teams,
the use of psychologists in Guantanamo, and then Geoffrey Miller,
going from Guantanamo to, quote, "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib.

ALFRED McCOY: In mid-2003, when the Iraqi resistance erupted, the
United States found it had no intelligence assets; it had no way to
contain the insurgency, and they -- the U.S. military was in a state
of panic. And at that moment, they began sweeping across Iraq,
rounding up thousands of Iraqi suspects, putting many of them in Abu
Ghraib prison. At that point, in late August 2003, General Miller was
sent from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, and he brought his techniques with
him. He brought a CD, and he brought a manual of his techniques. He
gave them to the M.P. officers, the Military Intelligence officers and
to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. Commander in Iraq.

In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders,
for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the U.S.
Army Field Manual 3452, and if you look at those techniques, what he's
ordering, in essence, is a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress
positions and sensory disorientation, and if you look at the 1963
C.I.A. KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, 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, you look at General Sanchez's 2003
orders, 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 the specific
techniques, the way of achieving that, through the attack on these
sensory receptors.

AMY GOODMAN: And Rumsfeld's comment, when asked if it was torture,
when people were forced to stand hours on end, that he stands at his
desk?

ALFRED McCOY: Right, he wrote that in one of his memos. When he was
asked to review the Guantanamo techniques in late 2003 or early 2004,
he scribbled that marginal note and said, you know, "I stand at my
desk eight hours a day." He has a designer standing desk. "How come
we're limiting these techniques of the stress position to just four
hours?" So, in other words, that was a clear signal from the Defense
Secretary. Now, one of the problems beyond the details of these orders
is torture is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. There's an absolute
ban on torture for a very good reason. Torture taps into the deepest
recesses, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation
and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for
kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist, and it has a
powerful perverse appeal, and once it starts, both the perpetrators
and the powerful who order them, let it spread, and it spreads out of
control.

So, I think when the Bush administration gave those orders for,
basically, techniques tantamount to torture at the start of the war on
terror, I think it was probably their intention that these be limited
to top al-Qaeda suspects, but within months, we were torturing
hundreds of Afghanis at Bagram near Kabul, and a few months later in
2003, through these techniques, we were torturing literally thousands
of Iraqis. And you can see in those photos, beyond the details of the
techniques that we've described, you can see how that once it starts,
it becomes this Dantesque hell, this kind of play palace of the
darkest recesses of human consciousness. That's why it's necessary to
maintain an absolute prohibition on torture. There is no such thing as
a little bit of torture. The whole myth of scientific surgical
torture, that torture advocates, academic advocates in this country
came up with, that's impossible. That cannot operate. It will
inevitably spread.

AMY GOODMAN: So when, Professor McCoy, you started seeing these
images, the first photos that came out at Abu Ghraib, the pictures we
showed of the, you know, hooded man, electrodes coming out of his
fingers, standing on the box, your response?

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, I mean, the reason I wrote this book is when that
photo came out in April 2004 on CBS news, at the Times, William
Safire, for example, writing in the New York Times said this was the
work of creeps. Later on, Defense Secretary Schlesinger said that this
was just abuse by a few people on the night shift. There was another
phrase: "Recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland." In other
words, this was the bad apple thesis. We could blame these bad apples.
I looked at those photos, I didn't see individual abuse. What I saw
was two textbook trademark C.I.A. psychological interrogation
techniques: self-inflicted pain and sensory disorientation.

AMY GOODMAN: We read our first headline today. It was about Maher Arar
and the case - the judge has thrown out against him, the Canadian-
Syrian man who was sent back to Syria -- the U.S. government calls it
"extraordinary rendition," and he was kept in an underground "grave-
like" cell, he described, very small. He was held for almost a year.
As you showed, and I looked at the book, the pictures of the places
where prisoners are kept, and in speaking to Maher, he's described
this level of sensory deprivation. What about the shape and the size
and the coffin-like nature of these rooms?

ALFRED McCOY: The details are often left to the individual
interrogators, but the manuals basically describe how you control the
process, you control the environment right from the start when you
pick somebody up. So, for example, often times we see in Iraq of
people when they're arrested, their arms are behind their back.
They're made to kneel in very uncomfortable positions, and they're
hooded right away. That's one of the things they always specify is the
time and conditions of arrest. You begin to break them down. You
create this artificial environment of control, and then the techniques
always vary. It can be extreme darkness or it can be extreme light; it
can be absence of sound or a bombardment of sound.

AMY GOODMAN: And that bombardment of sound is often joked about. 'Oh,
we played Britney Spears really loud,' or whatever it is. I don't know
if it was her. But that's become a joke when soldiers play loud
music.

ALFRED McCOY: Well, though, actually, that's one of the problems of
talking about this topic in the United States, is that we regard all
of this panoply of psychological techniques as "torture light," as
somehow not really torture. Okay? And we're the only country in the
world that does that. The U.N. convention bars - defines torture as
the infliction of severe psychological or physical pain. The U.N.
convention which bans torture in 1984 gives equal weight to
psychological and physical techniques. We alone as a society somehow
exempt all of these psychological techniques. That dates back, of
course, to the way we ratified the convention in the first place.

Back in the early 1990s, when the United States was emerging from the
Cold War, and we began this process of, if you will, disarming
ourselves and getting beyond all of these techniques, trying to sort
of bring ourselves in line with rest of the international community,
when we sent that -- when President Clinton sent the U.N. Anti-Torture
Convention to the U.S. Congress for ratification in 1994, he included
four detailed paragraphs of reservation that had, in fact, been
drafted by the Reagan administration, and he adopted them without so
much as changing a semicolon. And when you read those detailed
paragraphs of reservation, what you realize is this, is that the
United States Congress ratified the treaty, but basically we outlawed
only physical torture. Those photographs of reservation are carefully
written to avoid one word in the 26 printed pages of the U.N.
convention. That word is "mental." Basically, we exempted
psychological torture.

Now, another problem for the United States, as well, was when the U.S.
Army re-wrote the Army Field Manual in 1992, the same period, while,
although let's say the civil authorities were sort of skirting the law
by exempting psychological techniques, the U.S. Army re-wrote their
field manual with the intention of strictly observing the letter and
the spirit of the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention and other similar
treaties. So what happened is that when the Defense Department gave
orders for extreme techniques, when General Sanchez gave orders for
his techniques beyond the Army Field Manual, what that meant is when
the soldiers were actually investigated, they had committed crimes
under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They would be prosecuted,
and they're all being sent to jail.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor McCoy, you wrote a piece, "Why the McCain
Torture Ban Won't Work: The Bush Legacy of Legalized Torture."

ALFRED McCOY: Right. Most Americans think that it's over, that in last
year, December 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the Detainee Treatment
Act 2005, which in the language of Senator McCain, who was the
original author of that amendment to the defense appropriation, the
author of that act, it bars all inhumane or cruel treatment, and most
people think that's it, that it's over, okay? Actually, what has
happened is the Bush administration fought that amendment tooth and
nail; they fought it with loopholes. Vice President Cheney went to
Senator McCain and asked for a specific exemption for the C.I.A.
McCain refused. The National Security Advisor went to McCain and asked
for certain kinds of exemptions for the C.I.A. He refused.

So then they started amending it. Basically what happened is, through
the process, they introduced loopholes. Look, at the start of the war
on terror, the Bush administration ordered torture. President Bush
said right on September 11, 2001, when he addressed the nation, "I
don't care what the international lawyers say. We're going to kick
some ass." Those were his words, and then it was up to his legal
advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate
his otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives, and they did it
by crafting three very controversial legal principles. One, that the
President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties.
Two, that there was a possible defense for C.I.A. interrogators who
engage in torture, and the defenses were of two kinds. First of all,
they played around with the word "severe," that torture is the
infliction of severe pain. That's when Jay Bybee, who was Assistant
Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said, "'severe' means
equivalent to organ failure," in other words, right up to the point of
death. The other thing was that they came up with the idea of
intentionality. If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was
information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty. The
third principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo is not
part of the United States; it is exempt from the writ of U.S. courts.
Now, in the process of ratifying - sorry, passing the McCain torture -
the torture prohibition, McCain's ban on inhumane treatment, the White
House has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three
key principles. In his signing statement on December 30, President
Bush said --

AMY GOODMAN: This was the statement that he signed as he signed the
McCain so-called ban on torture?

ALFRED McCOY: Right, he emailed it at 8:00 at night from his ranch in
Crawford on December 30th, that he was signing this legislation into
law. He said, "I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head
of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do to defend America."
Okay, that was the first thing. The next thing that happened is that
McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision
that if a C.I.A. operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture
but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that's
a defense. So they got the second principle, defense for C.I.A.
torturers. The third principle was - is that the White House had
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain's amendment by
inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act,
the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory, and
last month --

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.

ALFRED McCOY: So, and then in the last month, the Bush administration
has gone to federal courts and said, "Drop all of your habeas corpus
suits from Guantanamo." There are 160 of them. They've gone to the
Supreme Court and said, "Drop your Guantanamo case." They have, in
fact, used that law to quash legal oversight of their actions.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. I want to thank you very much,
Professor Al McCoy, for speaking with us, professor of history at
University of Wisconsin, Madison, his book A Question of Torture:
C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War On Terror.