Dick Durbin Quotes

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.

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

Our men ... have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up.... Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to "make them talk," and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later... stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses

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.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

I'm sorry, those pictures from the Abu Ghraib. At first, they, like infuriated me, I was sad. Then like, a couple days later, after they cut the guy's head off, they didn't seem like much. And now, I like to trade them with my friends.

The torture and other sadistic abuses of prisoners in Iraq have done immense damage already to America's reputation in the world, and the worst may be yet to come. Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management: U.S. management.

When those pictures of Abu Ghraib came out, I thought, my gosh, this is like the tiger cages for prisoners in Vietnam all over again. Only we were actually doing it ourselves, we weren't hiring another government to do it.

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.

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

Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses.

Regrettably, it has become clear that torture of detainees in United States custody is not limited to Abu Ghraib or even Iraq. Since Abu Ghraib, there have been increasing reports of torture.

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.

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?

It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.

Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too?

The Supreme Court of the United States... has validated the Nazi method of execution in... concentration camps, starving them to death.

I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture.

Saddam Hussein wrote the book on human rights violations.

The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.

The cruelties committed against the Hottentots exceed everything that is said about it in Cape Town or what can be imagined.

Attacking women and children was both wrong and counter—productive.

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