“... No “terrorist” gene is known to exist or is likely to be found… Surely the (y), and their supporters were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that? Simple logic says that we must go to the roots of terror. Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidal terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere.” Ouch Borith: Permanent Representative of the Kingdom of Cambodia to the UN on 10/03/2001
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“As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.” Voltaire
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“What our leaders and pundits never let slip is that the terrorists—whatever else they might be—might also be rational human beings ; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational justification for their actions. Most terrorists are people deeply concerned by what they see as social, political, or religious injustice and hypocrisy, and the immediate grounds for their terrorism is often retaliation for an action of the United States.” William Blum
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How great the lie right to the top: “We don't torture people in America and people who say we do simply know nothing about our country.” George W. Bush [Interview with Australian TV - October 18, 2003]
“One thing is for certain: There won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.” George W. Bush [press availability in Monterrey, Mexico, Jan. 12, 2004]
“They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay. They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages.” Richard Bourke, Australian attorney
“Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.” - Edward Kennedy
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If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -- even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles: - Alberto J. Mora, former Navy General Counsel [Feb. 27, 2006 issue of The New Yorker, entitled "The Memo"]
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The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world: James Baldwin [From chapter one of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976), page 489 of Collected Essays (1998)]
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“The coward wretch whose hand and heart can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start from the slightest pain or equal foe.” Bertrand Russell
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"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951
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"If they do it, it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom." - Anthony Quainton, U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, 1984: Anthony Quainton - Source: Off the record response of the Ambassador to a group of concerned U.S. citizens when asked to explain the difference between U.S. government actions in Nicaragua and the violence it condemns as terrorism elsewhere in the world.
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19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society: Rocco Galati (Amazingly, several of these “dead” terrorists are still alive! The real terrorists are our own billionaire elites)
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" ... No "terrorist" gene is known to exist or is likely to be found... Surely the(y), and their supporters were afflicted by something that caused their metamorphosis from normal human beings capable of gentleness and affection into desperate, maddened, fiends with nothing but murder in their hearts and minds. What was that? Simple logic says that we must go to the roots of terror. Only a fool can believe that the services of a suicidal terrorist can be purchased, or that they can be bred at will anywhere: Ouch Borith: Permanent Representative Of The Kingdom Of Cambodia To The UN: 10/03/2001
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“There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used.... Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.” - Gil Bailie
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"So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create 'social justice' is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity." -- Thomas Sowell
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"People who think of government as the institution to entrust with enough power to right all the world's wrongs seem to never consider that they must thereby give it enough power to do wrong to all the world's rights. In fact, they seem NEVER to consider what the founders always thought was obvious: that the 'good guys' will NOT always be in charge!" -- Bert Rand
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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H.L. Mencken 1880-1956 American journalist, satarist, social critic, anti-establishment figure, considered by scholars as one of America's greatest writers, known as 'The Sage of Baltimore.'
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“When a government begins the drumbeat of “terrorism,” you can be quite confident it is the government that is the “terrorist” and what they call “terrorist” is simply an impotent puppet whose strings are being pulled by that government and the hidden powers that control it.” Gary Amirault
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"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-----torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians ... which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."--George Orwell
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"Hitler killed only one person in his lifetime: himself. All the other atrocities that are attributed to him were carried out by people who were only following orders" Mark A. Goldman (Hmmm, to our knowledge the Bush Presidents never personally killed anyone either, but there are hundreds of thousands dead at their hands.)
Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Convention. Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us -- every single one of us -- knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them. - John McCain, Republican US Senator (Really? Senator McCain?)
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Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management. - Edward Kennedy
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The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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"They are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo Bay. They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it in the Dark Ages". Richard Bourke, Australian attorney
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[torture] "presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others' suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness".. . - Ariel Dorfman [from his book "Torture: A Collection"]
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"A society bingeing on fear makes itself vulnerable to far more profound forms of destruction than terror attacks. The "terrorism war", like a nostalgic echo of the cold war, is using these popular fears to advance a different agenda - the re-engineering of American life through permanent mobilization." - William Greider
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"The healthy man does not torture others." Carl Gustav Jung
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"What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry combined with a belief that the torture of millions is not desirable, whether inflicted by Stalin or by a Deity imagined in the likeness of the believer" Bertrand Russell
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"The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the 'conscience' of the civilized world. " James Baldwin [From chapter one of "The Devil Finds Work" (orig. pub. 1976), page 489 of Collected Essays
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"Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason." Octavio Paz quotes
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If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -- even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception the whole Constitution crumbles. - Alberto J. Mora, former Navy General Counsel [Feb. 27, 2006 issue of The New Yorker
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This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed, were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees. - Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz (Sound familiar, Americans? Israelis?)
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This fight has nothing to do with soldierly gallantry or principles of the Geneva Convention. If the fight against the partisans is not waged with the most brutal means, we will shortly reach the point where the available forces are insufficient to control the area. It is therefore not only justified, but it is the duty of the troops to use all means without restriction, even against women and children, so long as it ensures success. - Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of Germany [Dec. 16, 1942] (Neocons are trumpeting the same message.)

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