Jane Mayer Quotes

Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.

What these memos do is they make legal acts that were criminal prior to these memos.

The idea is that if we can put our own people through something almost as bad as what they might have to go through if they were taken captive, they will inoculate themselves.

The fear is that we'll move in the direction from being a democracy to an oligarchy.

If you have an informed electorate, it makes great choices.

The world's a small place and people are watching; and, you know, somebody disappears, the family knows and their colleagues know, and so eventually, these things do get out.

And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them.

Money has much more power down the ballot.

Torture is illegal, both in the U.S. and abroad. So - and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration.

David and Charles Koch are pretty much as far right as you can get on the ideological spectrum without falling off. They are far right libertarians, very anti-government, very pro-business, very anti-tax, anti-regulatory, in favour of free markets ruling the day.

But there have been many news reports that water-boarding has been used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is one of the major al Qaeda figures that we have in U.S. custody.

The smaller the office, the more power individuals with big money have.

It was our view of the worst that could befall our people if they were taken captive. So, what was fascinating to me was that somehow it appears the techniques that we have feared most in the world would be used on our people, we are using on people in our custody.

I mean, the people who run Guantanamo, the military, pretty much dismiss complaints by the detainees because they say that they're all created as part of a political process to sort of fake complaints and get public support.

Well, yes, I mean, I think that, you know, my sources suggest that there’s a lot of support for the notion that there is a lot of Koran abuse and that it was very much a systematic design, not just an aberration.

What I write about is how much influence it's had in things like state legislatures and governorships and congressional races. The other thing that's even more important in the long run is that very extreme money has affected the ecosystem of ideology in the country.

Ethically, I think pretty much every code of ethics for doctors suggests that they should not be in an interrogation room, particularly if there's anything coercive or abusive going on.

Well, they are critics of the Bush administration generally on the human rights record of the administration, and in particular, they are very, very critical of this use of science.

I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark.

The concern that I have is that, as wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of a few, economic inequality grows, and power also becomes more unequal.

The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.

There have been waves of reform in the past. I see no reason why they wouldn't happen again.

The Kochtopus is the nickname that people who've worked for the Kochs came up with because there's so many tentacles and it likes the shadows. I really feel the first step is to provide the information.

Let's face it, the subject of campaign finance is not always scintillating. But it's incredibly important.

I kept thinking maybe in the future editions [of Dark Money] I should sell it along with, like, some kind of, you know, Pepto Bismol or something. I wanted it to read a little bit like a thriller, so that it truly grabbed people.