As the American Psychological Association debates whether its members should be involved in so-called coercive interrogation, Alfred W. McCoy is trying to get psychologists to own up to their past.
Mr. McCoy, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA InterÂrogation From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan Books, 2006). The book is a detailed indictment, brimming with outraged accusations â?? what one reviewer called “a flashlight beaming into the dark closets of government.”