Alfred McCoy – författare

Campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama offered an impassioned denunciation of the 'enhanced' interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration in its War on Terror - methods that included sensory deprivation, self-inflicted pain, and waterboarding. But four years later America has yet to prosecute or punish these abuses. Tracing the origins of this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present, Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for torture a bipartisan policy of the U. S. government under presidents Bush and Obama. During the early years of the Cold War, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to weaken a subject's resistance to interrogation. For many of those subjected to these experiments, the result was an experience akin to psychosis. Leaving its most lasting scars on the psyche rather than the body, such torture lent itself to propagation, and for three decades the U.S. shared these methods with its anti-Communist allies around the globe. After the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11th, 2001, the CIA opened its own prisons, and American agents began, for the first time, to dirty their hands with waterboarding and wall slamming. Simultaneously, mass media offered enticing, often eroticized simulations of torture in film, television, and computer games that normalized this illegal practice for millions of Americans. In the absence of legal sanction for the perpetrators or the powerful who commanded them, media exposés and congressional hearings have proved insufficient deterrents. The American public, preoccupied with the nation's failing economy, has seemingly moved on. But the images of abuse from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are seared into human memory, doing lasting damage to America's moral authority as a world leader.

Throughout four millennia of recorded history there has been no end to empire, but instead an endless succession of empires. After five centuries of sustained expansion, the half-dozen European powers that ruled half of humanity collapsed with stunning speed after World War II, creating a hundred emerging nations in Asia and Africa. Amid this imperial transition, the United States became the new global hegemon, dominating this world order with an array of power that closely resembled that of its European predecessors.As Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the European Union now rise in global influence, twenty leading historians from four continents take a timely look backward and forward to discover patterns of eclipse in past empires that are already shaping a decline in U.S. global power, including:erosion of economic and fiscal strength needed for military power on a global scalemisuse of military power through micro-military misadventuresbreakdown of alliances among major powersweakened controls over the subordinate elites critical for any empire’s exercise of global powerinsufficient technological innovation to sustain global force projection.