Coercive Interrogation Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Renditions before and since 9/11 share some basic features. They have been conducted lawfully, responsibly and with a clear and single purpose: Get terrorists off the street and gain intelligence on those still at large. Our detention and interrogation programs flow from the same inescapable logic.

Rendition is just sending people abroad to be tortured.

Prior headquarters approval must be obtained for the interrogation of any subject against his will [or] … if bodily harm is to be inflicted [or] if medical, chemical, or electrical methods or materials are to be used.

Experience shows that the reliance on illegal, immoral, and inhumane interrogation techniques is universally a very poor choice.

Torture produces unreliable evidence and therefore doesn't achieve and protect anybody. Torture corrupts those who are doing the torturing.

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 my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste.

People plead guilty or admit to crimes they didn't commit for various reasons. Certain interrogation procedures produce high rates of false confessions.

The third degree is widely and brutally employed in New York City.... Third-degree methods, authoritatively reported to us as recently employed include: Punching in the face, especially a hard slap on the jaw; hitting with a billy [club]; whipping with a rubber hose; kicking in the abdomen; tightening the necktie almost up to the choking point; squeezing the testicles. Methods are favored which do not leave visible marks, because these attract the attention of the courts and sometimes lead district attorneys not to use the confession. There is said to be a practice that the arresting officer does not commonly do the beating; another man will do it, so that when the arresting officer takes the stand it cannot be charged that he used force.

I was arrested three times and tortured once.

We do not need torture as an available instrument of interrogation.

Torture is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or 'disappearance' to be carried out by their officials with impunity.

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy.

I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice.

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

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

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

Assuming you get useful information from torture, then why not always use torture? Why stop at the bomb that’s already been planted and people who know where the explosives are? Why not people who are building the explosives, or people who are donating money, or transferring the funds for the explosives? Why stop at the victim himself? Why not torture the victims’ families, their relatives, their neighbors? If the end justifies the means, then where would you draw the line?

I felt grand juries were illegal and coercive.

As a general rule, interrogations without clearly defined legal limits are brutal. Particularly when they have an imperative to get information out of a captive immediately.