Mark Bowden Quotes

It’s not a pretty sight when you are waterboarding anybody … I am proud of the decisions I took including the destruction of the tapes …. We needed to come up with additional techniques that would convince the terrorists that their fate was in our hands … if the tapes were seen by anybody outside of the CIA, we would look terrible

The U.N. fiddled while Saddam slaughtered.

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.

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.

The Bush administration will go down in history as the Torture Team.

If I were an innocent individual, flown to a foreign country and held for several years and tortured, I'd become a terrorist, too. I'd go to war against the U.S.

The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.

I mean, we've had all these awful pictures from the prison in Iraq and these sort of memos floating around about justifying torture, all this kind of stuff. And it makes you want to take a shower, you know?

One thing that in my reporting that I found and was amazed to find was that, as far as I could determine, neither high-level White House officials in the Bush administration nor even the top brass at the CIA even knew the history of water boarding when they approved it.

We knew that if the photos of CIA officers conducting authorized EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques) ever got out, the difference between a legal, authorized, necessary, and safe program and the mindless actions of some MPs (military police) would be buried by the impact of the images.

When I wrote my eighth thriller, 'Inside Out,' in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.

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

[The new Congolese] security forces committed unlawful killings, torture, beatings, acts of rape, extortion and other abuses, largely with impunity.

54,000 Latin American soldiers graduated from the School of the Americas since 1986. These soldiers are known to commit atrocities and execute torture techniques

It doesn't take hours after human rights violations for the denials to begin, for the fabricators to begin their dirty work of covering up what happened.

We need to know how taxpayer dollars are being used to support torture and human rights abuses.

Most victims of rendition were arrested and detained illegally in the first place: some were abducted; others were denied access to any legal process, including the ability to challenge the decision to transfer them because of the risk of torture. There is also a close link between renditions and enforced disappearances. Many of those who have been illegally detained in one country and illegally transported to another have subsequently “disappeared”, including dozens who have “disappeared” in US custody. Every one of the victims of rendition interviewed by Amnesty International has described incidents of torture and other ill-treatment

Legal issues aside, the American people and government should never abide the use of torture by our military or intelligence agencies. A decent society never accepts or justifies torture. It dehumanizes both torturer and victim, yet seldom produces reliable intelligence. Torture by rogue American troops or agents puts all Americans at risk, especially our rank-and-file soldiers stationed in dozens of dangerous places around the globe. God forbid terrorists take American soldiers or travelers hostage and torture them as some kind of sick retaliation for Abu Gharib.

The Syrian people deserve much more than complicit silence, or timid criticism from those who have failed to refer the regime to the International Criminal Court despite acknowledgement if its crimes.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever may be invoked to justify torture, including war, threat of war, internal political instability, public emergency, terrorist acts, violent crime, or any form of armed conflict..

WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars and broken stories about corporate corruption.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

One might oppose the CIA program, but Abu Ghraib it ain't.