Through impressive research and penetrating analysis, Alfred W. McCoy reveals the hidden mechanisms of U.S. global power, focusing on the Philippines as a microcosm of worldwide trends. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to todayrs"s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from Americars"s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. This imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century-using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day.