Abby Martin Quotes

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

The soldiers were trained to strap explosives onto their bodies and throw themselves under the American tanks that were expected in the invasion of Japan. We were a military hospital and were required to so train medical orderlies.

To help students steel themselves for captivity, SERE used a variety of 'stress and duress' techniques. The military's encyclopedic knowledge of these techniques was paid for in American blood because it was gleaned from former POWs tortured by totalitarian regimes. One technique, waterboarding, was a historically well-known torture.

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.

And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them.

I was reading about all of these medical and psychological experimental programs that the government and various intelligence agencies had run throughout the 20th century. Any book you can read on that, there's some really horrifying and fascinating stuff that goes on there.

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.

If you live around dummies and fake blood for six months, it becomes a part of you. It's fake blood, but sometimes I still feel the real scent of blood, so it's more mentally collapsing, not only physical.

No military tactic is unreasonable if it can further destroy enemy morale and quickly.

I was given several types of torture… I was given what they called the ‘water cure’…I felt…like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.

I think sometimes you go through an experience, and you don't feel the impact, especially in a war experience, until way past it.

You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn't of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that's not your business. They should've trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies.

I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire.

In reference to the Army and Navy, lately employed with so much distinction on active service, care shall be taken to insure the highest condition of efficiency; and in furtherance of that object, the Military and Naval Schools, sustained by the liberality of Congress, shall receive the special attention of the Executive.

In psychology, trying to force others to accept the reality of a fake world is called gaslighting. It got its name from the 1944 film 'Gaslight,' in which a husband convinces his wife and their neighbors that she is insane.

I saw the waterboarding device in Cambodia's notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh and did not see another until I was strapped down on an identical one at SERE. Waterboarding was administered as a 'stress demonstrator' to show that an enemy could make one say anything. And one does.

In 'The Darkest Minds,' Zu's trauma manifests in her choosing to remain silent. It's her one small way she can feel in control of her otherwise uncontrollable situation.

I joined the Marines, passed Special Forces selection, and became a young leader in the military.

People who have had severe childhood traumas lack the ability to regulate emotions and, as a result, gravitate toward whatever primitive means they can come up with.

Our military sons and daughters that are placed in harm's way deserve the right equipment, the right training, and the right rules of engagement to win decisively on any field of battle.

In the media, waterboarding is called 'simulated drowning,' but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.

Negative public opinion of a conflict and the politicization of the military can negatively affect service members and contribute to PTSD.

I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.

If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.