2nd Conference
The Quaker Initiative To End Torture
June 1-3 2007
Guilford College
Greensboro, North Carolina
QUIT is pleased to announce our Keynote speaker is Alfred McCoy!
Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After earning his Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history at Yale in 1977, his writing on this region has focused on two topics--the political history of the modern Philippines and the politics of opium in the Golden Triangle.
His first book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, 1972), originally sparked controversy when the CIA tried to block its publication. But after three English editions and translation into nine foreign languages, this study is now regarded as the "classic" work on the global drug traffic (Revised Edition, New York, 2003).
Three of his books on Philippine history have won that country's National Book Award. And in 2001, the Association for Asian Studies awarded him the Goodman Prize for his career contributions to the historical study of the Philippines. His most recent monograph on that country, Closer Than Brothers (New Haven, 1999), studies the impact of CIA torture training upon the Philippine military. Drawing on lessons learned from torture's lingering legacy in the Philippines, he published A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York, 2006), exploring the impact on America of a half-century of propagating and practicing psychological torture.
His forthcoming book on Philippine police during the 20th Century will draw together the main two strands in his research, the covert netherworld and modern Philippine history, to explore the transformative power of police, information, and scandal in the shaping of both the Philippine polity and the U.S. national security state.
Through these global studies of crime and covert operations, his work has, in recent years, moved beyond a regional focus on Southeast Asia to broader, transnational reflections on the character of what he calls, for want of better words, the "covert netherworld", that invisible interstice inhabited by criminal syndicates and clandestine services.
QUIT is pleased to announce our Keynote Speaker Tony Lagouranis!
Tony Lagouranis is a former Army Interrogator and Arabic linguist. He served in Iraq from January 2004 until December 2004. He has spoken at length to the media and elsewhere about systemic detainee abuse and the failure of the American occupation in Iraq. He has also written a book, entitled, "Fear Up Harsh" to be published by Penguin on June 5th 2007.
[Archive Note: Tony Lagouranis was unable to attend the conference]