Bill Browder Quotes
If there was one senator who could truly empathize with being tortured in prison, it was John McCain.
Browder, Bill. Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice. Simon & Schuster, 2015.
This is a particularly ironic quote. Although Arafat verbally and officially opposed torture, but used it frequently within the PLO and its “law enforcement” efforts amongst the Palestinians.
Neilson had flown in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. It was the first bombing of Tokyo in WWII. He was shot down and captured. He was tortured including the torture of ‘waterboarding.’ The Japanese who administered the torture and who allowed it were tried before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—the Tokyo War Crime Trials. They were convicted and punished. In the first decade of the 21st century the George W, Bush Administration argued that waterboarding was not necessarily torture despite the fact that Americans had tried and punished foreigners who engaged in the practice and even Americans who did. It was completely outlawed by military regulations but some Americans felt that it should be allowed by the CIA in dealing with terrorists.
After the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat hundreds of Egyptian religious fundamentalists were rounded up, jailed and tortured. al-Zawahiri broke under torture and revealed the names of some of his anti-government associates. Although he was not personally involved in the murder of Sadat, he served three additional years in jail. Motivated by has thirst for revenge at his torturers and his guilt at having been forced to betray his friend, he learned all he could about terrorism from the older Jihadists also in the same jail, and when he was released he elevated Islamic terrorism to another level by developing a strategy for the use of suicide bombers.
He was finally brought to justice after being protected by the right wing for many years. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. See related quote.
Named after penal reformer Johne Howard, 1726-1790. Howard Associations have since been organized in many countries.
On a tour of America, Dickens visited Eastern State Penitentiary, a Pennsylvania prison opened in 1829 which was supposedly a “modern” reform in law enforcement. Rather than work gangs or mandatory factory work and filthy living conditions, this was the first “penitentiary” in America. The guilty convicts would be in a small clean but bare cell for all but 1 hour or less a day, and the only thing in the cell other than soap and a toothbrush was a Bible. The convict was supposed to spend his entire sentence reading the Bible and being penitent for his crimes. It destroyed most inmates mentally until the Supreme Court ruled in 1890 that total solitary confinement was unconstitutional.
William Felix Browder is an American-born British financier and political activist. He is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, the investment advisor to the Hermitage Fund, which at one time was the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia. The Hermitage Fund was founded in partnership with Republic National Bank, with $25 million in seed capital. The fund, and associated accounts, eventually grew to $4.5 billion of assets under management. In 1997, the Hermitage Fund was the best-performing fund in the world, up 238%. The primary investment strategy of Browder was shareholder rights activism. Browder took on large Russian companies such as Gazprom, Surgutneftegaz, Unified Energy Systems, and Sidanco. In retaliation, on November 13, 2005, Browder was refused entry to Russia, deported to the UK, and declared a threat to Russian national security.
