Jane Mayer Quotes

Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

It's hard to look at [Donald] Trump as a hopeful sign because, in his own way, he is offering false solutions to many problems.

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

In fact, Charles Koch tried to get [Mike] Pence to run for the White House in 2012.

One of the oddities of this election is the man that [Donald] Trump chose as his vice-president, Mike Pence, is one of the Kochs' favourite politicians.

They [the Kochs] want free trade and cheap labour. They own the second-largest private company in America, which is a huge multinational corporation. So they are on a different wavelength.

Donald Trump actually is a pretty big-government conservative. He doesn't see eye-to-eye with them [the Kochs] on trade.

[The Kochs] they hate big government.

Money has much more power down the ballot.

The great unknown in this country is where this leaves the Republican Party after this election. Will it be the party of the Kochs or will it be the party of [Donald] Trump?

There's been a 40-year effort on the far right to build up think tanks, academic programs, advocacy groups, to push a particular ideology. That's really where the impact is that people don't see.

There are some areas where the Kochs are on the same page with [Donald] Trump. He doesn't believe in global warming. He says it's a hoax .

[Donald] Trump has put forward a list of people he would like to see on the Supreme Court, whom the Kochs would be very happy with too. So it's not all bad for them.

The possibility exists that the Kochs will walk away with even more power if [Donalds] Trump's defeated.

There's not as much big money on the left, but you've got George Soros, who has the Open Society Institute. He's pushing liberal policies.

It's hard for them to run away from their record. The Kochs are businessmen.

It's quite amazingly radical, what their [the Kochs] vision of America would be.

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

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

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

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.

We would see another president being accused of being illegitimate, and undermined from day one, which is exactly what these donors did to [Barack] Obama.

There's a difference between those two [George Soroses and the Tom Steyers] and the Kochs that I think is important.

[Tom] Steyer is specifically spending money on candidates who will take action against climate change.

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.

Libertarianism is supposed to be all about principles, but what it's really about is political expedience. It's basically a corporate front, masked as philosophy.