Alfred W. McCoy > Quotes

“Psychology’s service to U.S. national security has produced a variant of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called, in his study of Nazi doctors, a “Faustian bargain.” In this case, the price paid has been the American Psychological Association’s collective silence, ethical “numbing,” and, over time, historical amnesia. 3 Indeed, Lifton emphasizes that “the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil”; in defense of this argument, he cites the Cold War “role of …American physicians and psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency…for unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation.” 4”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

“Testing has found that professional interrogators perform within the 45 to 60 percent range in sorting truth from lies, little better than flipping a coin.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

“Despite CIA rhetoric that gave Phoenix a sanitized, technical patina, the program soon devolved into an exercise in brutality that produced many casualties and few verifiable results.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

“When we reflect on these incidents in Abu Ghraib prison and beyond, it seems that torture was systematic, not aberrant, and that its widespread proliferation was symptomatic of both command decisions and a crisis in the ranks over a failing pacification effort.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

“In 2002, moreover, in a report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises, the National Academies announced a fundamental paradigm shift: “Large, abrupt climate changes have affected hemispheric to global regions repeatedly,” with “changes of up to 16 degrees Celsius and a factor of 2 in precipitation … in periods as short as decades to years.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change

“Publicly at the UN and in other international forums, American representatives condemned torture, particularly the communists’ use of psychological techniques. Simultaneously and secretly, however, U.S. government agencies were already engaged in classified research to find more effective methods of mind control.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

“Writing to the Washington Post in 2007, two top U.S. generals drew upon their years of command experience to warn of such a slippery slope. “As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture,” the generals wrote, “the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real ‘ticking time bomb’ situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of ‘flexibility’ about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone—the rare exception fast becoming the rule.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

“A survey of the wastelands left by this and other CIA secret wars brings to mind what the ancient Scots chieftain Calgacus once said of the Roman Empire: “They make a desolation and they call it peace.”115”
― Alfred W. McCoy, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change

“Diane Beaver, who served as State Judge Advocate on Guantanamo’s Joint Task Force in 2002–04, when it adopted harsh methods, told an interviewer that the show 24 had inspired many of the eighteen controversial interrogation techniques used on detainees, including waterboarding, sexual humiliation, and the terrorizing of prisoners with dogs. Jack Bauer, she said, “gave people lots of ideas,” adding: “We saw [24] on cable [and] it was hugely popular.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

“Only a year after ratifying the UN Convention against Torture, Clinton thus violated one of its key clauses, indicating that Washington would continue to favor covert operations over compliance with international law.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation