Alfred W. McCoy

Encyclopedia : A : AL : ALF : Alfred W. McCoy

Alfred W. McCoy is a historian and current Professor of History in the "Center for Southeast Asian Studies", at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received an undergraduate degree from Columbia University and his PhD in Southeastern Asian history from Yale University. He primarily researches and writes about Philippines history and on the Golden Triangle drug trades of opium and heroin; his The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia was a landmark work documenting the interactions between the CIA and drug trade in Southeast Asia. He wrote in the book, "However, American involvement had gone far beyond coincidental complicity; embassies had covered up involvement by client governemnts, CIA contract airlines had carried opium, and individual CIA agents had winked at the opium traffic. As an indirect consequence of American involvement in the Golden Triangle until 1972, opium production steadily increased....Southeast Asia's Golden TRiangle grew 70 percent of the world's illicit opium, supplied an estimated 30 percent of America's heroin, and was capable of supplying the United States with unlimited quantities of heroin for generations to come."^{[#endnote_383]} The CIA's actions were more specificablly described by him thus: "In most cases, the CIA's role involved various forms of complicity, tolerance or studied ignorance about the trade, not any direct culpability in the actual trafficking....The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug-lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection. In sum, the CIA's role in the Southeast Asian heroin trade involved indirect complicity rather than direct culpability." ^{[#endnote_385]}

In 2001, the Association for Asian Studies awarded him the Grant Goodman Prize for his career contributions to the study of the Philippines.

References

↑ pg 385 of , by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, 2003, ISBN 1-556-52483-8
*↑ pg 383

Partial bibliography

Laos: War and Revolution, co-editor, 1970
The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred W. McCoy with Cathleen B. Read and Leonard P. Adams II, 1972, ISBN 06-012901-8
An Anarchy Of Families (state and family in the Philippines), 1998, ISBN 9-715-50128-1
Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy, 1999, ISBN 0-300-07765-3
A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror, 2006, ISBN 0-805-08041-4

External links

[UW-Madison prof Alfred McCoy fields questions on torture, U.S. ethics] The Daily Cardinal
[Page] on McCoy at the "Center for Southeast Asian Studies"
[Interview] of McCoy on The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
["A Correspondence with the CIA"] -(part of an article for the The New York Review of Books on the CIA's interest in his Politics of Heroin
["Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research"] -(article for Counterpunch on the Abu Ghraib tortures)
["The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib"] -(similar editorial for Truthout)

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.