Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century (Dispatch Books) and A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (Metropolitan Books).
How two administrations and both parties made illegality the American way of life.
Across the Greater Middle East from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Yemen, democratic protests are threatening to sweep away subordinate elites crucial to the wielding of American power.