Interrogation Quotes

It is often necessary to trick people into confessing.

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

Criticism always seemed to me a lot like police work. You look for clues, fingerprints, motives. You need to construct an airtight case.

I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture … and we are leading this fight by example.

I do not - I never believed it's better to kill a terrorist than to detain him. We want to detain as many terrorists as possible so we can elicit the intelligence from them in the appropriate manner so that we can disrupt follow-on terrorist attacks.

Anyone will say anything under torture.

What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fishlike smell; a kind of not of the newest poor-John. A strange fish!

I think it is scary anytime anyone is coming at you asking questions.

I think if you're forthright and answer a lot of questions, sometimes you'll get people who won't let you answer the questions, and that makes for a difficult answer.

The Usage of Torture is contrary to all the Dictates of Nature and Reason; even Mankind itself cries out against it, and demands loudly the total Abolition of it.

… whose hatred of the Jews in unbridgeable.

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions.

Detention in a controlled environment and perhaps for a lengthily period is frequently essential to a successful counterintelligence interrogation of a recalcitrant source.

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

To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.

I would be a terrible CIA officer in real life.

I always say I have a Socratic approach to most things that I do. I pummel people with questions, because I need to know what they're thinking, what they're trying to achieve, what they believe the final outcome is going to be.

The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.

Anyone and everyone eventually confesses under torture.

When a man is in love, jealous, and just whipped by the Inquisition, he is no longer himself.

The torture of a criminal during the course of his trial is a cruelty consecrated by custom in most nations. It is used with an intent either to make him confess his crime, or to explain some contradiction into which he had been led during his examination, or discover his accomplices, or for some kind of metaphysical and incomprehensible purgation of infamy, or, finally, in order to discover other crimes of which he is not accused, but of which he may be guilty

I was asking Charlie the most important questions, and you heard the answers.

I like to consider myself a detective, which is how I justify my obsession with my phone. By nature, since I was a kid, I've always wanted to be a detective, and any portal to information and investigating things I have ever been given access to, I have dived into. With my phone, unfortunately, I have immediate access to everything.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

One way to solve a mystery is by asking the right questions until answers start to emerge.