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A new exposé gives an account of the CIA's efforts to develop new forms of torture, spanning half a century. It reveals how the CIA perfected its methods, distributing them across the world, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantànamo torture scandals. We're joined by its author, Alfred McCoy -- Welcome to Democracy Now! Give us a history lesson.

Well, if you look at the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, in that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of CIA torture. It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental CIA techniques, developed at enormous cost.

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA ran a massive research project, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from mass persuasion to the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they discovered -- they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum -- was that none of it worked. What did work was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and McGill -- and the first breakthrough came at McGill.

Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the CIA in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. All he did was have student volunteers lie in a cubicle with goggles, gloves, and earmuffs on, so that they were cut off from their senses. Within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, the students suffered first hallucinations, and then ultimately breakdowns.

The second major breakthrough came at the Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the CIA studied Soviet KGB torture techniques, and they found that the most effective KGB technique was self-inflicted pain. The interrogator simply makes somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand, the interrogator tells them, "You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down." And as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they suppurate, hallucinations start, and the kidneys shut down.

And the combination of those two techniques -- sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain -- is the basis of the CIA's technique.

Now, this produced a distinctively American form of torture, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, psychological torture, and it's the one that's with us today, and it's proved to be a very resilient, quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm. In 1963, the CIA codified these results in the so-called KUBARK Counterintelligence Manual.

Let's make one thing clear. Americans refer to this often as "torture light." But psychological torture, people who are involved in treatment tell us, is far more destructive, does far more lasting damage to the human psyche than does physical torture. It does far more lasting damage. It is far crueler than physical torture.

One of the things that Donald Rumsfeld did, right at the start of the war of terror, in late 2002, was to appoint General Geoffrey Miller to be chief at Guantànamo. General Miller turned Guantànamo into a de facto behavioral research laboratory, a kind of torture research laboratory. And under General Miller at Guantànamo, they perfected the CIA torture paradigm. They added two key techniques.

They added to it an attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity.

And then they created these things called "Biscuit" teams (behavioral science consultation teams), and they actually had qualified military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation, and these psychologists would identify individual phobias, and by 2003, under General Miller, Guantànamo had perfected the CIA paradigm, and it had a multi-fold assault on the human psyche: through sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain, cultural sensitivity, and individual vulnerabilities.

And then they sent General Miller to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib.

Yes. In 2003, when the Iraqi resistance erupted, the United States military was in a state of panic. They began sweeping across Iraq, rounding up thousands of Iraqi suspects, putting many of them in Abu Ghraib prison. In late August 2003, General Miller was sent from Guantànamo to Abu Ghraib, and he brought his techniques with him. He brought a CD, and he brought a manual of his techniques. He gave them to the Military Police (MP) officers, the Military Intelligence officers, and to General Ricardo Sanchez, the US Commander in Iraq.

In September of 2003, General Sanchez issued detailed orders for expanded interrogation techniques beyond those allowed in the US Army Field Manual. What he ordered, in essence, was a combination of self-inflicted pain, stress positions, and sensory disorientation. If you look at these orders alongside the 1963 CIA KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, and at the 1983 CIA Interrogation Training Manual that they used in Honduras for training officers in torture and interrogation, you will see a striking continuity across this forty-year span, in both the general principles and in specific techniques.

And Rumsfeld's comment, when asked if it was torture when people were forced to stand hours on end, was that he stands at his desk?

Right, he wrote that in one of his memos. He has a designer standing desk. When he was asked to review the Guantànamo techniques in late 2003 or early 2004, he scribbled that marginal note and said "I stand at my desk eight hours a day. How come we're limiting these techniques of the stress position to just four hours?"

Torture is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. It taps into the deepest recesses of human consciousness, where creation and destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist, and it has a powerful perverse appeal. Once it starts, and both the perpetrators and the powerful who command them let it spread, it spreads out of control.

I think when the Bush administration gave those orders for techniques tantamount to torture at the start of the war on terror, I think it was probably their intention that these be limited to top al-Qaeda suspects. But within months, US personnel were torturing hundreds of Afghanis at Bagram near Kabul, and a few months later in 2003, through these techniques, soldiers were torturing literally thousands of Iraqis. And you can see in those photos how once it starts, it becomes this Danté-esque hell, this kind of play palace of the worst recesses of human consciousness. That's why it's necessary to maintain an absolute prohibition on torture. There is no such thing as a little bit of torture. The whole myth of scientific surgical torture, which academic torture advocates in this country came up with, that's impossible. That cannot operate. It will inevitably spread.

The reason I wrote this book is when that famous photo of the hooded man came out in April 2004 on CBS news, William Safire, for example, writing in the New York Times said this was the work of "creeps." Later on, Defense Secretary Schlesinger said that this was just abuse by a few people on the night shift. I looked at those photos, and I didn't see individual abuse. What I saw was two textbook, trademark CIA psychological interrogation techniques: self-inflicted pain and sensory disorientation.

You wrote a piece, "Why the McCain Torture Ban Won't Work: The Bush Legacy of Legalized Torture."

Right. The language of McCain's bill, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, bars all inhumane or cruel treatment. But the Bush administration fought that amendment with loopholes.

President Bush said on September 11, 2001, right after he addressed the nation, "I don't care what the international lawyers say. We're going to kick some ass." Then it was up to his legal advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate his unlawful orders into legal directives, and they did it by crafting three very controversial legal principles.

The first legal principle offered by Bush's legal advisors was that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties.

The second principle was that there were two possible defenses for CIA interrogators who engaged in torture. First of all, they played around with the word "severe." That's when Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he said that to qualify as "severe," the pain inflicted must be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." The other potential defense was the idea of intentionality. If a CIA interrogator tortured, but the aim was information, not pain, then the interrogator could be considered not guilty.

The third principle, which was crafted by Justice Department Official John Yoo, was that Guantànamo is not part of the US; it is exempt from US courts.

Now, in the process of passing the Detainee Treatment Act, the White House has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three key principles. In his signing statement President Bush said "I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head of the unitary executive, to do what I need to do to defend America."

The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise, inserted into the legislation a provision that if a CIA operative engages in inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a lawful order, then that's a defense. So they got the second principle, defense for CIA torturers.

The third principle is that the White House had Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain's amendment by inserting language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the US Navy base at Guantànamo Bay is not on US territory.

An update from Alfred McCoy, May 2007

In June 2006 the Supreme Court decided in a second landmark decision, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Bush's military commissions were illegal. Just three months later, in a dramatic bid to re-legalize his policies in the aftermath of the Hamdan decision, President Bush announced he was transferring 14 top Al Qaeda captives from secret CIA prisons to Guantànamo Bay. At once both repudiating and legitimating past abuses, Bush denied that he had authorized "torture" while simultaneously defending the CIA's use of a tough "alternative set of procedures" to extract "vital information."

President Bush announced that he was sending legislation to Congress that would legalize the same presidential prerogatives in treatment of detainees that had been challenged by the Supreme Court. This was the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and after tense closed-door negotiations, it sailed through Congress.

This law strips detainees of their habeas corpus rights, sanctions endless detention without trial, and allows the use of torture-induced testimony before the Military Commissions.

Significantly, by using verbatim the narrow definition of "severe mental pain" the US first adopted back in 1994 in its exemptions from the UN anti-torture convention, this new law allows CIA interrogators ample latitude for future psychological torture. This legislation does not prohibit any aspect of the sophisticated torture techniques that the CIA has refined, over the past half-century, into a total assault on the human psyche.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, Washington is avoiding the taint of another Abu Ghraib by shifting the burden of interrogation and incarceration to the Iraqi police who have earned a universal reputation for abuse, torture, and summary executions. Just as the CIA escaped responsibility during the Vietnam War for some 41,000 extra-judicial executions by placing its Phoenix program under the nominal control of the South Vietnamese police, so the US military is shifting the onus for brutal interrogation to its allies in the Iraqi police.