Democracy Now: Historian Alfred McCoy

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Historian Alfred McCoy: Obama Reluctance on Bush Prosecutions Affirms Culture of Impunity

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ALFRED McCOY: We’re at a critical moment in the debate about torture. We’re at the exact moment historically we’ve been at six times over the past forty years. What’s happened since really 1970, right up to the present, because we’ve been engaged in torture continuously throughout this entire period, is that Congress and the press will conduct a major exposé of torture; the public will be momentarily aroused; there will be no sustained investigation, no prosecution, no penalty; the practice will continue. A few more years later, another revelation, another round of debate, discussion, nothing done, and then it emerges again.

So I think what’s fairly certain to say, that if the past teaches us anything, that unless there is serious prosecution and something beyond simply a legislative investigation, something more binding, something more permanent, that within five or six years, we’ll be faced with another major torture scandal just like this one, except it will be worse, because the world will remember this exposé. They’ll think that we tried to correct, and we didn’t correct, and they’ll realize that this is in fact American state policy, that torture is part of the apparatus of American power.

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ALFRED McCOY: Right. That’s exactly how you get impunity. That’s what’s happened every single time in the past. For example, in 1970, the House and Senate of the United States discovered that the Phoenix Program had been engaged in systematic torture, that they had killed through extraditial executions 46,000 South Vietnamese. That’s about the same number of American combat deaths in South Vietnam. Nothing was done. There was no punishment, and the policy of torture continued.

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http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/1/torture_expert_alfred_mccoy_obama_reluctance

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1. another good McCoy interview

Alfred McCoy on History Counts