For over one hundred years U. S. government authorities have imported draconian police state techniques and technology developed overseas back to the American homeland, whether involving torture, surveillance, and suspension of human rights and liberties, using the overseas country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. We saw evidence of this recently on the streets in Boston and Watertown with martial law maneuvers used in Iraq and Afghanistan. I witnessed Professor Alfred W. McCoy deliver these same illuminating remarks at the University of Tulsa and had an opportunity to briefly discuss aspects of his internationally recognized research on CIA covert operations, the global narcotics trade, and the origins of the National Security State with him. He is the author of The Politics  of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Traffic (New York: Lawrence  Hill Books, revised, 2003), and Policing  America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the  Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). From suppressing the Filipino Insurrection following the Spanish-American War to the destructive counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, these martial exercises in unlawful, extra-constitutional behavior have continued unabated. And like the prodigal son of New Testament scriptures, they have come home.

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