Michael Hayden Quotes

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

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.

That Dick Cheney is pro-torture surprises no one; he freely admits it.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

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

By 2003, if you didn't understand that the United States was inflicting torture on those deemed enemy combatants, you weren't paying much attention.

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?

I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.

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

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.

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.

Torture, including practices like waterboarding, violates the legal and moral standards of all civilized nations.

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?

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

The Vice President is not the Vice President of Torture.

Enhanced Interrogation

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.

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.

Things like Abu Ghraib and even Guantanamo are not new things: there are many precedents.

Guantanamo is still open, but it's unlikely that serious torture is going on at Guantanamo. There is just too much inspection.

Mistreatment of al Qaeda members and their friends and hangers-on is something I number among my moral concerns. But it's number 1,000,000,001.

I abhor anything that constitutes torture. Water-boarding, it's perfectly clear to me it is torture. I never supported extraordinary rendition to torture, always said that Guantanamo should be closed. There is no clash of ideals and pragmatism there.

No conditions justify torture.

It seems nothing good comes out of Abu Ghraib.