February 17, 2006
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]
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."
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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.
From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project,
a 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 separate, 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.
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