Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit’s last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. The church, impotent and malicious, regrets, not the abuse, but the loss of her power, and seeks to hold by falsehood what she gained by cruelty and force, by fire and fear. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising, unreasoning, aggressive and insolent. Christianity has held all other creeds and forms in infinite contempt, divided the world into enemies and friends, and verified the awful declaration of its founder – a declaration that wet with blood the sword he came to bring, and made the horizon of a thousand years lurid with the fagots’ flames. Robert G Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
The New York Times for example will not use the word torture. Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner, Freakonomics, caption, Sky Atlantic 2010; viz also novel
Sometimes a nation’s descent into moral depravity is marked by a sudden event, a coup for instance. Other times the signposts are smaller, subtler increments ... CTV in Canada has obtained a list that the Canadian government has given to its diplomats instructing them on how to deal with Canadian prisoners in countries that use torture: countries the list says include Syria, Iran and the United States of America. Keith Olbermann, Countdown MSNBC News report
Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers ... It is by imagination that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
The state plucked John Archer off the street. He was far from being the first man to be legally tortured in England, but he was the last. No warrant for torture would ever be issued in England again. The Strange Case of the Law II: The Story of English Justice: The Pursuit of Liberty BBC 2012
You’d be brought to shown the rack first. And if they didn’t illicit a confession ... slowly tightened by rotating the drum. Bridge Clifford, royal armoury
You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders. Jesse Ventura
America doesn’t torture. And I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Barack Obama
cf.
Obama endorses Bush secrecy on torture and rendition. American Civil Liberties Union webpage headline 2nd April 2009
Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature ... and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821-81, The Brothers Karamazov
The doctrine that was taught was that if you wanted information, you used physical abuse, you use false imprisonment, you use threats to family members, you use virtually any method necessary to get what you want ... torture and killing. Killing! Major Joseph Blair, Instructor at School of The Americas 1986-1889
US threatens Britain over terrorism ‘torture evidence’. Telegraph online article 5th February 2005
MI5 Accused of Colluding in Torture of Terrorist Subjects. Guardian 29th April 2008
What Terror Jury Was Told: ‘They Tore My Nails Out. Then I Was Interrogated By MI5’. Guardian 19th December 2008
Whitehall Devised Torture Policy For Detainees. Guardian 17th February 2009
Revealed – The Secret Torture Evidence MI5 Tried To Suppress. Guardian 8th July 2009
‘Cruel, Illegal, Immoral’: UK’s Role In Torture. Guardian 25th November 2009
The mournful shouts
Will be heard ...
Tortured and despoiled
And left at the end
Naked and motionless. Leonardo da Vinci
The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation. Charles Bukowski
The purpose of torture is not getting information. It’s spreading fear. Eduardo Galeano
The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. Carl Jung
The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul. John Calvin
The concert is a polite form of self-induced torture. Henry Miller
If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice. Alan Dershowitz
The steep decline in America’s image and standing after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power: the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater’s killings of Iraqi civilians. Shashi Tharoor
Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons. Iain Banks
To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t believe that. David Attenborough
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this? Albert Camus
Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it! And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they were destined to last for ever ... To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dread torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
‘At first, we beat them to death, but there was too much blood.’ The Act of Killing ***** executioner, Sky Atlantic 2016
‘There were people like me everywhere in the world.’ ibid. gangster
‘And that is the source of all my nightmares: I’m always gazed at by those eyes that I didn’t close.’ ibid.
He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his face. O’Brien was standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe. George Orwell, 1984
The confession was a formality, though the torture was real. How many times he had been beaten, how long the beatings had continued, he could not remember. Always there were five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. Sometimes it was fists, sometimes it was truncheons, sometimes it was steel rods, sometimes it was boots. ibid.
On December 1st 2002 Dilawar, young Afghan taxi driver, took three passengers for a ride. He never returned home. Taxi to the Dark Side, BBC 2007
Five days after his arrival [Bagram] he was dead. ibid.
‘We were also told they are nothing but dogs. Then all of a sudden you start looking at these people as less than human, and you start doing things to them you would never dreamt of, and that’s when it got scary.’ ibid. Sgt Ken Davis, Abu Ghraib
Wood maintained that the Bagram model had tacit approval from superiors. ibid.
When the Red Cross toured Bagram the sleep deprivation chart was erased and the prisoners were unshackled. ibid.
She later testified his legs had been pulpified. ibid.
A week after September 11th vice-president Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press to describe how interrogation policies were about to change. ibid.
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: This detention camp has shocked the world and split America. In his first act as president Barack Obama set himself a solemn deadline: ‘Guantanamo will be closed no later than one year from now.’ But hitting that deadline has proved impossible. This World with Michael Portillo: Closing Guantanamo, BBC 2010
They didn’t want to afford them ‘prisoner of war’ status and they wanted them beyond the reach of American law: Guantanamo Bay was their solution. ibid.