Policing America's Empire

Book excerpt: At the dawn of the twentieth century, U.S. Army occupied Manila and plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign. Armed with technology from America's first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created modern police and intelligence units. In Policing America's Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial control slowly crushed Filipino revolutionary movement with firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony, it would intervene in Philippines for next half century using it as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. Trying to create a democracy in Philippines, the United States unleashed undemocratic forces that persist to present day. Security techniques bred under colonial rule were not contained. Migrating homeward through personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under pressures of wartime mobilization, this American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for fifty years, as a matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties--Publisher's description.