Alfred W. McCoy is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the book, "The Politics of Heroin," an examination of the CIA's alliances with drug lords, and "Closer Than Brothers," a study of the impact of the CIA's psychological torture method upon the Philippine military.

Today a shorter version of his article on the C.I.A.'s history of torture appears in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Even as pundits fantasized about "limited, surgical torture," the Bush administration, following the president's orders after 9/11 to "kick some ass, " was testing and disproving their theories by secretly sanctioning brutal interrogation that spread quickly from use against a few "high-value target" al Qaeda suspects to scores of ordinary Afghans and then hundreds of innocent Iraqis.

....Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of the Cold War. At the United Nations and other international forums, Washington has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal standard for human rights. Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions, a number of which the United States has ratified.

A longer version of his article is available here. An even longer version will appear in The New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 19, No. 2, 2004).Also don't miss Human Rights First September 9 report, Detainee Abuse: New Human Rights First Report Details Failings of Pentagon Investigations