Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Quotes

We're going to do things beyond waterboarding perhaps, if that happens to come.

The silliest, most frustrating national dialogue has been this chattering about waterboarding and slapping around bad guys in order to extract information from them.

One thing about Guantánamo, beyond anything else, is the commitment against all odds to allow Americans to view themselves as the good guy, no matter what the situation is.

It’s not a pretty sight when you are waterboarding anybody … I am proud of the decisions I took including the destruction of the tapes …. We needed to come up with additional techniques that would convince the terrorists that their fate was in our hands … if the tapes were seen by anybody outside of the CIA, we would look terrible

I've been water-boarded, and I speak from experience, and it's torture.

Unlike the Japanese internment, water-boarding was ordered and served up in secret. But it, too, was America's policy, not just Dick Cheney's. Congress was informed about what was happening and raised no objection. The public knew, too.

One thing that in my reporting that I found and was amazed to find was that, as far as I could determine, neither high-level White House officials in the Bush administration nor even the top brass at the CIA even knew the history of water boarding when they approved it.

I do support enhanced interrogation techniques. Obviously their value is shining through with respect to the bin Laden killing.

Water-boarding can result in damage to the lungs and the brain, as well as long-term psychological trauma.

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.

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

The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.

Certainly 'Zero Dark Thirty' is not for children!

I would not restart, under any circumstances, an interrogation program at CIA.

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.

Bin Laden’s death and the debate over torture.

If I was in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.

'We don't torture' is the anguished cry of squishy people who have decided that trying to frighten terrorists by roughing them up is somehow the very definition of torture.

I think Guantanamo, has been synonymous with the staining of American values and American legal tradition.

I would absolutely authorize something beyond waterboarding. And believe me, it will be effective.

I mean the fact is that some of this information that we have found out that led to Usama bin Laden actually came from these enhanced interrogation techniques.

In the case of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, an issue that is central to the film - torture - is so important that I feel I must say something. Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow have been irresponsible and inaccurate in the way they have treated this issue in their film.

If the practice is torture for the al Qaeda operative who masterminded the killing of three thousand Americans, why weren't there court-martials in the cases of those thousands of servicemen similarly treated as part of their training?

Congress's definition of torture in those laws - the infliction of severe mental or physical pain - leaves room for interrogation methods that go beyond polite conversation.