Profound Quotes

"Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." From 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower' by William Blum

From "9-11, Six Years Later": "If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure of government agencies. " Paul Craig Roberts

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Categories

 We Tortured To Justify War                      : Information Clearing House - ICH

We Tortured To Justify War
Dick Cheney keeps saying “enhanced interrogation” was used to stop imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.
By Joe Conason
May 15, 2009 “Salon.com” — The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked — at least not by [...]

Op-Ed Contributor - Congress’s Torture Bubble - NYTimes.com

JUST four members of Congress were notified in 2002 when the Central Intelligence Agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” program was first approved and carried out, according to documents released by the agency last week. They were Senators Bob Graham and Richard Shelby and Representatives Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi, then the chairmen and ranking members of [...]

Al Jazeera English - Americas - US detainee abuse ‘unprecedented’

A former US official has accused the administration of George Bush, the former president, of authorising “unprecedented” acts of abuse during the interrogation of terror suspects.
Phillip Zelikow told a US senate hearing on torture practices that the Bush administration was guilty of a “collective failure” over the interrogation of “war on terror” detainees.
“The US government [...]