Bret Stephens Quotes

I have personally led, witnessed, and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people.

There's just no doubt in my mind - under any set of rules - water boarding is torture.

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.

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

… there are numerous examples of cases where relying on information obtained through torture has disastrous consequences. The reality is that use of torture produces inconsistent results that are an unreliable basis for action and policy. The overwhelming consensus of intelligence professionals is that torture produces unreliable information. And the overwhelming consensus of senior military leaders is that resort to torture is dishonorable. Use of such primitive methods actually puts our own troops and our nation at risk.

The CIA held about a hundred detainees from 2002 to 2008; about a third of them underwent interrogations that have been variously described as enhanced, tough or torture. The toughest technique was water boarding, used on three detainees, the last in early 2003.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

Experience shows that the reliance on illegal, immoral, and inhumane interrogation techniques is universally a very poor choice.

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.

If waterboarding's OK, why don't we let our police do it to suspects so we can learn what they know? We only seem to waterboard Muslims... Have we waterboarded anyone else?

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.

I think when you have lawyers arguing over whether you can keep a detainee at 46 degrees... for two hours, that's not torture. It may be unpleasant, it may be coercive... but let's say what torture actually is, and that's not it.

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.

I'm not for it [waterboarding torture] but it doesn't have anything to do with the Constitution .... Just as the Constitution is silent about lots of other horrible things.

Torture was never intended in its earliest days to be a quest for the truth. It was intended to get people to confess to things they hadn't done like being a witch. We have turned it around and tried to legitimize it.

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 United States doesn't and can't condone torture. And I want to make very clear that that's the view and the policy of the administration, the policy of the president, and that he's made very clear to American personnel that we will not condone torture....Senator, under no circumstances should we or have we condoned torture.

There's been a lot of experience with torture in history. It doesn't work.

Waterboarding isn't torture. We do waterboarding to our own soldiers in the military.

'We don't torture' is the anguished cry of squishy people who have decided that trying to frighten terrorists by roughing them up is somehow the very definition of torture.

The American public should know that the Senate report actually reveals that 82% of detainees subjected to enhanced interrogation did, in fact, produce intelligence that saved American lives.

Our waterboarding program is based on the U.S. military training program... tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen were waterboarded pursuant to this program to prepare them for the possibility of being captured someday so that they would know what it felt like.

The photographs of Iraqi prisoners being subjected to degrading and humiliating treatment by their captors, and the reports of acts of sexual abuse, physical abuse, and other acts of maltreatment shock the conscience.