George Takei Quotes

These are show trials. If the defendant is convicted, he goes to Guantanamo Bay. If he is acquitted, he goes to Guantanamo Bay. If the trial is abandoned, he goes to Guantanamo Bay. I don’t know why they are holding this trial.….

The tactics that the Trump administration are using on the streets of Portland are abhorrent. People are being literally scooped off the street into unmarked vans, rental cars, apparently. They are being denied probable cause. And they are denied due process. They don't even know who's pulling them into the vans.

There is nothing more foreign to a civilised and democratic system than preventive detention.

If it is not totalitarian to arrest a man and detain him, when you cannot charge him with any offence against any written law --- if that is not what we have always cried out against in Fascist states -- then what is it?

Reports about very innocent people being thrown into detention, where they could be held for years without any representation or charges, is distressing.

Detention without trial is history in Malaysia.

People should not be imprisoned without having the ability to challenge the legality of that imprisonment.

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.

The United States is holding hundreds of suspected terrorists in prisons at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Many are locked up indefinitely. They have not been tried or even charged with any crime.

Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.

Police were frequently involved in arbitrary arrests and detentions, often motivated by attempts to collect bribes. Some of these problems could be attributed to the very poor working conditions of the police, including low rates of pay

… [Secret detention is] odious to a democratic society

As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing.

Control orders put people not convicted of any crime under virtual house arrest based on scant evidence. Billed as a security backstop, they proved unreliable.

There are some lines in the sand you just do not cross. Undermining basic civil liberties by locking people up for long periods without charge is one of them.

If it is not totalitarian to arrest a man and detain him, when you cannot charge him with any offence against any written law – if that is not what we have always cried out against in Fascist states – then what is it?… If we are to survive as a free democracy, then we must be prepared, in principle, to concede to our enemies – even those who do not subscribe to our views – as much constitutional rights as you concede yourself.

If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool.

A lot of people are now criticizing Attorney General John Ashcroft for his policy on detaining what he considers suspicious people. I think he's going a little overboard. Today, he arrested the entire band Foreigner.

Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the current discussion is framed as "When can the President kill an American citizen?" Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it.

The police didn't afford you a phone call. You just disappeared for a while. And what was scary was we lived in a state where some people disappeared forever.

We now live in a country with a thousand political prisoners, a country where each week there are new trials, where people are put in jail because they liked something on the Internet.

...any form of government that required the repression, imprisonment, and execution of those who disagreed with it was certainly not a government of the people.

I'm not going to say how, specifically, but I will continue to speak out about human rights and freedoms. Absolutely. We can speak out about what we are angry about, but the most important thing is to try and help people understand the reality and not be blinded by something that is not the truth.

Any use of the names of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, in connection with any violence or killing of police, is reprehensible and against the pursuit of justice in both cases.

Honduras has become a murder capital of the world; there's horrible atrocities, infanticide, murder of women is way up, and people are fleeing in desperation. They come to the border, and we put them in trucks and send them back to Mexico to die. And here people are scared of illegal immigrants - that's what we're doing. It's pretty shocking.