Quotes from Alfred W. McCoy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.