Torture worldwide and the CIA

madison.com: When UW-Madison professor Alfred McCoy first saw the photograph of a hooded Iraqi prisoner from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, he remembers feeling a sickening shock of recognition.

Hooded, arms outspread, tethered to fake electrical wires, the prisoner was balancing on a small, upended box.

What McCoy saw when he looked at the image was a classic demonstration of torture techniques pioneered and taught by the Central Intelligence Agency - something McCoy has run across several times around the world during his research on subjects ranging from drugs to revolution.

Thus began a trip back in time for McCoy, 60, a sojourn into a dark subject that has surfaced previously in his research and about which he has written, though not in great detail. The subject had so depressed him that he left it behind some years ago.

But after Abu Ghraib, McCoy began his own methodical investigation into the connections between the CIA and torture. The result is a book released this month called "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror."

In it, McCoy draws on more than 30 years of research and sometimes dangerous fieldwork to put the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib into a 50- year historical context. His work implicates the CIA in the use and propagation of psychological torture techniques worldwide. Read more