Andrew Sullivan Quotes About Torture

Quotes about: Torture

• The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Religious, Order, Political

  "Imaginationland". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. October 25, 2007.

• It is not an opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.

  Andrew Sullivan

  War, Interrogation Techniques, President

  "What 'Torture' Is". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. May 18, 2007.

• That's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Fate, Dark, Office

  "Imaginationland". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. October 25, 2007.

• If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Order, Light, Giving

  "'Disgrace', Ctd". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. June 19, 2008.

• Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks. How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques is true?

  Andrew Sullivan

  Historical, Enemy, Gains

  "Bush, McCain, Torture". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. July 02, 2008.

• It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans.

  Andrew Sullivan

  America, Tragedy, Resistance

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