Political Quotes

“I am here to express my strong opposition to President Trump's nomination of Gina Haspel to be the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. There are two reasons I oppose this nomination: Ms. Haspel's support for torture and her willingness to destroy evidence of the CIA's use of torture. For years, apologists for the CIA's program have tried to redescribe this inhumane practice to make it seem less appalling to the American people. They have even renamed it. Torture has been rebranded as ``enhanced interrogation.'' There is no way to hide the basic facts. The techniques used by the CIA were torture: waterboarding so the person had the repeated sensation of drowning, confining people to small boxes for hours on end, depriving people of sleep for days, forcing people to hold painful stress positions. The CIA did not invent these tactics. Listen to an American war hero describe what he endured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. I was being forced to stand up continuously--sometimes they'd make you stand up or sit on a stool for a long period of time. I'd stood up for a couple of days, with a respite only because one of the guards--the only real human being that I ever met over there--let me lie down for a couple of hours while he was on watch in the middle of one night. Speaking about his captors, this former American POW said: They bounced me from pillar to post, kicking and laughing and scratching.…”