Malcolm Nance Quotes

…the inflicting of pain, physical or mental, to extract confessions or statements... is widespread throughout the country.

Tainted evidence often comes from torture.

Torture is an extremely effective tool for getting people to talk. It is a terrible tool for getting people to tell the truth.

So, it, of course, makes one wonder how many other people there might be who are completely innocent, who have been sent by the U.S. to countries where they've been interrogated, and in some instances it seems tortured.

Congress's definition of torture in those laws - the infliction of severe mental or physical pain - leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation.

We do not need torture as an available instrument of interrogation.

Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

The norm was to kill everyone who was kidnapped. And anyone kidnapped was tortured … torture didn’t always work. It left people too destroyed …Torture is eternal. It has always existed and always will. It is an essential part of the human being …. Not one innocent person passed through my hands.

The prison officials practiced such excessive cruelty that they were jeopardizing the entire system

Religious pacifists were confined in unsanitary guardhouses—sometimes in unheated cells during winter months, without blankets …. Men were … beaten, pricked or stabbed with bayonets, jerked about with ropes around their necks, threatened with summary execution, tortured by various forms of the “water cure.”

We have been tortured horribly for months in filthy Egyptian jails.

Enhanced Interrogation

The leaders must be tortured fiercely in order that we may obtain a complete understanding of their organization.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice.

I would not restart, under any circumstances, an interrogation program at CIA.

The silliest, most frustrating national dialogue has been this chattering about waterboarding and slapping around bad guys in order to extract information from them.

When men are arrested without any legal basis and for political reasons, it's merely a routine, everyday occurrence in Russia, and hardly anyone has any sympathy.

While the notion that torture works has been glorified in television shows and movies, the simple truth is this: torture has never been an effective interrogation method.

When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste.

Police in China can do whatever they want; after 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realise that they don't have to obey their own laws. In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want - not only you, your whole family and all people like you.

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody has severely undermined our Nation's position in the world.

I know for a fact that torture is not productive. That’s not professional interrogation. We don’t do torture.

Anyone and everyone eventually confesses under torture.