Secher Nbiw: Torture is Useless

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Torture is Useless

Dear Friend,

Did you see the news? Yesterday a military judge overseeing the first war crimes trials at Guantanamo refused to consider evidence obtained in "highly coercive environments and conditions." So now not only is information acquired through torture unreliable, un-American and immoral, it's also useless.

Now, TrueMajority is working with Catholics United and School of the Americas Watch to bring you the voices of torture survivors and military interrogators who are asking Sen. McCain to regain his moral footing and ban torture.

Watch the video and sign their petition demanding an end to torture.

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"Who lies for you will lie against you." -Bosnian proverb

"A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent." -William Blake

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"Respect for the truth is an acquired taste." -Mark Van Doren

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why are they poor, they call me a Communist." -Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara

"People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty." -Richard J. Needham

"Speak the truth, but leave immediately after." -Slovenian proverb

"The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore."" -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." -Oscar Wilde

"Some people will not tolerate such emotional honesty in communication. They would rather defend their dishonesty on the grounds that it might hurt others. Therefore, having rationalized their phoniness into nobility, they settle for superficial relationships." -Author Unknown

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"At least in popular parlance, what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus' divinity or Buddhism's Four Noble Truths but that they hold certain moral positions on bedroom issues such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion." -Stephen Prothero

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“Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth.” -Publius Cornelius Tacitus

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“Cultural relativism, inferred from the enormous variety of existing cultures, remains a prerequisite of objective analysis: one must first understand a culture in its own terms, not in terms of theoretical or practical schemes imposed on it from the outside. But the moral corollary of cultural relativism—moral relativism—has been quietly discarded, except as a form of intellectual indulgence among those who claim the privileges of non-involvement.” -Eric R. Wolf

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"There is an appalling directness about your questions, Watson. They come at me like bullets." -Sherlock Holmes

"The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: 'I feed on your energy.'" --Addenda to Orders in Council The Emperor Paul Muad'dib

"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do." -William Blake

Secher Nbiw

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Torture is Useless

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