Water Boarding Quotes

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.

The CIA held about a hundred detainees from 2002 to 2008; about a third of them underwent interrogations that have been variously described as enhanced, tough or torture. The toughest technique was water boarding, used on three detainees, the last in early 2003.

When you look at the big issues post-9/11 in the United States, whether it's water boarding, warantless wire tapping, surveillance, Gitmo, black sites rendition, all of those have been legal. Nobody has gone to jail for those programs.

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.

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

Religious pacifists were confined in unsanitary guardhouses—sometimes in unheated cells during winter months, without blankets …. Men were … beaten, pricked or stabbed with bayonets, jerked about with ropes around their necks, threatened with summary execution, tortured by various forms of the “water cure.”

We go out on a hike, catch a negro and ask him if he has a gun; he will give us a polite bow and say 'No sabby,' and then we take hold of him and give him the 'water cure,' after which he can get us two or three guns. Now, this is the way we give them the water cure: lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don't give up, pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I'll tell you it is a terrible torture.

The Railway Man was a particularly intense and immersive experience. I definitely got carried away. I lost about 35 pounds. I really was incredibly skinny and also quite unwell while we were filming. It wasn't very healthy. I don't recommend it. But then also doing the torture scenes, the water boarding stuff, there wasn't really any other way just to do it really.