Alfred W. McCoy

Alfred William McCoy (born June 8, 1945) is a historian of Southeast Asia. He is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. McCoy graduated from the Kent School in 1964. He earned his B.A. from Columbia College, and his Ph.D in Southeast Asian history from Yale University.

Thesis

McCoy has researched and has written about Philippines history, and about Southeast Asia, and in particular about the Golden Triangle drug trades of opium and heroin. His book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972 first ed.),documented the interactions between the CIA and drug cartels in that region.

The principal thesis of McCoy's work is that organized crime in both America and Europe collaborated in a wide-ranging conspiracy to establish new centers of opium production, heroin refining and distribution in Southeast Asia. This collaboration occurred following the effective suppression of the heroin trade in America during World War II and the subsequent decision to stamp out opium growing by Turkey which had been one of the main sources of raw opium. The collaboration was greatly facilitated by the Central Intelligence Agency and by the unstable political situation created by the ongoing Vietnam War.

McCoy points out that the French SDECE military intelligence agency during the First Indochina War (1947–1954) was in need of money for its covert operations. Its officers contacted opium producers in the Golden Triangle, and set up an international system of smuggling aided by intelligence and other aid from SDECE. This system persisted past the war, and became the French Connection.

McCoy asserts that the "French Connection" conspiracy arose from an alliance between the Corsican Mafia, who had an historical presence in South Vietnam dating back to the French occupation, and between the leading members of the American and Sicilian Mafia under the leadership of Lucky Luciano who had been imprisoned in the U.S. during World War II for racketeering but who was asked also to provide assistance to American military intelligence about Axis infiltration of Mafia-controlled, waterfront in American ports as well as assisting Allied forces in their invasion of Sicily and Italy. According to McCoy, Luciano reportedly used his contacts in the Sicilian Mafia to assist U.S. forces by gathering intelligence and identifying both fascist collaborators and Socialist/Communists in the Italian resistance movement who were then systematically eliminated.

In return for his assistance, Luciano was covertly permitted to run his crime operations from prison, and at the end of the war he was deported back to Sicily, where he immediately began a major expansion of his drug operations, forging alliances with Corsican Mafia members in South Vietnam and organised crime figures in other countries, including Australia.

McCoy wrote in the book, "American involvement had gone far beyond coincidental complicity; embassies had covered up involvement by client governments, CIA contract airlines had carried opium, and individual CIA agents had winked at the opium traffic. As an indirect consequence of American involvement in the Golden Triangle until 1972, opium production steadily increased....Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle grew 70 percent of the world's illicit opium, supplied an estimated 30 percent of America's heroin, and was capable of supplying the United States with unlimited quantities of heroin for generations to come."

The CIA's actions were more specifically described by him thus: "In most cases, the CIA's role involved various forms of complicity, tolerance or studied ignorance about the trade, not any direct culpability in the actual trafficking ... [t]he CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug-lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection. In sum, the CIA's role in the Southeast Asian heroin trade involved indirect complicity rather than direct culpability."

McCoy believes the CIA recruited drug lords in the frame of the Cold War, underlying a "conflict between the drug war and the cold war." For instance, McCoy suggests that the CIA assisted drug lords in Burma in 1950 in operations against China. He also alleges similar drug trafficking from 1965 to 1975 in Laos and through the 1980s in Afghanistan, supporting for example the drug and warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezbi-i Islami guerilla group.

He also uncovered money laundering activities by banks controlled by the CIA, first the Castle Bank which was then replaced by the Nugan Hand Bank, who had as legal counsel William Colby, retired head of the CIA. He also alludes to the BCCI, which seems to have played the same role as the Nugan Hand Bank after its collapse in the early 1980s, claiming that "the boom in the Pakistan drug trade was financed by BCCI."

Between a repressive policy (the "Drug war"), which he considers a failure ("The repression creates a shortfall in supply which raises price and then stimulates production everywhere around the world.") and a full legalization of drugs, which he considers "politically impracticable", McCoy argues in favour of an "alternative strategy," "regularization": "I favor regulation because if cocaine and heroin are commodities let's deal with them as such. You don't repress commodities, you regulate them." Furthermore, against bilateral agreements between the US and other nations (Colombia, Bolivia, etc. - see coca eradication campaign by the US), McCoy argues in favour of multilateral policies under the direction of the United Nations.

Recent work

In his book "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror", McCoy shows how from the start of the Cold War to the early nineteen-sixties, the C.I.A. spent billions of dollars developing psychological tools for interrogation. Early on, the emphasis was on electroshock, hypnosis, psychosurgery, and drugs, including the infamous use of LSD on unsuspecting soldiers and civilians, but these methods appeared a complete waste of time, although they were of dubious legality. Drawing on the sensory deprivation work of Canadian neurological scientist Donald O. Hebb, it was found that sensory deprivation was far more effective in brainwashing subjects than beattings or physical pain. Furthermore "self-inflicted pain" (for example forcing an uncooperative subject to stand for many hours with arms outstretched) were more effective means of breaking prisoners. Augmented by fears of physical abuse, sexual humiliation, and other psychological attacks on personal and cultural identity, McCoy has explained how the US government produced exactly the system on display in the Abu Ghraib abuse photographs These were regularised in the The first manual, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation," dated July 1963, and then used in a series of U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals, that were widely distributed to right wing dictatorial anti-communist regimes around the world during the cold war, and special training in these torture methods was given at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA). The manuals provide detailed techniques for infiltrating social movements, using torture to interrogate suspects, surveillance, maintaining military secrecy, recruiting and retaining spies, and controlling the population. Throughout the Bush administration Dick Cheney retained personal copies of the training manuals.

These methods were used during the Vietnam War, in Project Phoenix, a joint CIA and Vietnamese counter-insurgency operation, resulted in the torture of tens of thousands of suspected Viet Cong and sympathizers and caused the deaths of more than 26,000 of them. They were also used in the Philippines during the Marcos years and in Iran by the Shah's notorious Savak.

McCoy shows that since the time of the Roman author Ulpian torture has never been good at eliciting information. Those tortured will confess to anything to get the pain to stop, and often invent information they think the torturer wants to hear. He also demonstrates that not only is the evidence that torture fails to work, it in fact increases hatred of the regimes that use it, and undoubtably contributed to the fall of the Marcos and Shah of Iran's regimes.

In Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and through extraordinary rendition, the CIA made widespread use of torture of suspects, producing no useful information that could be used in any criminal court against any suspect. Scapegoats have been tried for these offences. McCoy showed, that from World War II, "Empathic Interrogation" used against fanatic Japanese has been found to be far more effective, and, used by the FBI, has resulted in a number of successful prosecutions. McCoy also demonstrates, not only does torture produce psychotic effects upon the tortured, it historically has led to violence afterwards perpetrated by torturers, citing evidence in both the Philippines and with the OAS in France after its use in Algeria and Vietnam. He concludes "In sum, the powerful often turn to torture in times of crisis, not because it works but because it salves their fears and insecurities with the psychic balm of empowerment."

Grant Goodman Prize

In 2001, the Association for Asian Studies awarded him the Grant Goodman Prize for his career contributions to the study of the Philippines.

See also

• Air America (airline)
• Barry Seal
• CIA_transnational_human_rights_actions
• Claire Sterling – specifically the following books: Octopus: The Long Reach of the International Sicilian Mafia (1990), Crime Without Frontiers (1994), and Thieves' World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime (1994)
• Gary Webb
• Iran-Contra
• United_Nations_Convention_Against_Torture

Partial bibliography

• Laos: War and Revolution, co-editor, 1970
• The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. CIA complicity in the global drug trade, by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, 1972, ISBN 0-06-012901-8
• An Anarchy Of Families (state and family in the Philippines), 1998, ISBN 971-550-128-1
• Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy, 1999, ISBN 0-300-07765-3
• Alfred W. McCoy, "Requiem for a Drug Lord: State and Commodity in the Career of Khun Sa," in, Josiah McC. Heyman, ed., States and Illegal Practices (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 129–67.
• Alfred W. McCoy, "Mission Myopia: Narcotics as 'Fall Out' from the CIA's Covert Wars," in, Craig R. Eisendrath, ed., National Insecurity: U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), pp. 118–48.
• Alfred W. McCoy, "The Stimulus of Prohibition: A Critical History of the Global Narcotics Trade," in, Michael K. Steinberg, Joseph J. Hobbs, and Kent Mathewson., eds., Dangerous Harvest: Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 24–111.
• A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2006, ISBN 0-8050-8041-4
• Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (edited volume co-edited with Francisco A. Scarano), University of Wisconsin Press Spring 2009
• Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State University of Wisconsin Press Fall 2009
• Torture and Impunity (Critical Human Rights), University of Wisconsin Press, July 20, 2012, ISBN-10: 0299288544

External links

• Homepage at the Department of History, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Interview of McCoy on The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
• "A Correspondence with the CIA" (part of an article for The New York Review of Books on the CIA's interest in his Politics of Heroin)
• "Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research" -(article for CounterPunch on the Abu Ghraib tortures)
• Interview: Democracy Now, Transcript and Audio February, 2006
• Lecture "A Short History of Psychological Terror" exploring the history and use by the CIA of psychological torture
• How America Will Collapse (by 2025)
• Interview (Part 1): Democracy Now, Transcript and Audio, September 2012, As Italy Sentences 23 CIA Agents in Rendition Case, Obama Refuses To Prosecute Anyone For Torture, Democracy Now!
• Interview (Part 2): Democracy Now, Transcript and Audio, September 2012, Alfred McCoy: "Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation" (Pt. 2), Democracy Now!

References

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