"Forty years after Nuremberg, torture with no pretense of research has become, in many countries, a common instrument of government. Modern medical knowledge and technology, and occasionally medical practitioners, are implicated in this "epidemic" of torture. Because torture is applied to the body and ravages the physical and psychological constitution of its victims, people with special skills in affecting the body and mind may become accomplices in the spread of this malignancy. There are many levels of cooperation in torture: the unwilling participant can be duped or coerced to join in torture; the willing participant engages in torture quite deliberately."

Albert R. Jonsen, (professor of ethics in medicine at the University of California, San Francisco)

"All such routine malpractices violate medical ethics as defined by one of three oaths sworn by every physician before he or she starts to practice: to do no harm, provide assistance to all in need, and only treat with the consent of the patient.

Yet every day these pledges are flagrantly abused by doctors whose actions conform to the generally accepted definition of torture produced by the United Nations; Amnesty International, and other human rights organizations: the deliberate infliction of pain by one person on another in an effort to break the will of the victim."

Gordon Thomas

Journey Into Madness

"Modern medical knowledge and technologies are such that those with special skills know exactly how to use them to assault the physical and psychological constitutions of their victims."

Dr. Frederico Allodi (Canadian Psychiatrist and member of Amnesty International Medical Group)

"there�s a doctor in Beirut who epitomizes what is meant by medical torture. He drugs the hostages to make them easier to handle, so that they can be moved from one safe house to another with less problems. He knows how long to keep them hooded and when to isolate them. That sort of thing. He�s genuinely evil."

Arial Mesari (Director of Studies into Terrorism, at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv)

"On my twenty-third day in al-Radvania, my torturers woke me at four in the morning. At five they dragged me, naked to the waist, to roll call. Everything began as usual . This time, though, they didn�t take to the regular torture chamber, but rather to a special room. They tied me to a chair that was bolted to the floor. I didn�t ask what was coming next, avoided the men�s gazes, and stared at the wall in front of me. It was absolutely quiet in the room. All at once, one of the torturers asked, "Do you want to know what we injected Sabah Merze Mahmoud with>?"

I nodded. The man laughed, showing his rotten teeth, got up, walked over to me, and squeezed my right forearm with his massive hand. He pulled a pencil out of his breast pocket with the other and poked the tip into the crook of my arm. He drew it back and forth, as if he were looking for a vein. Once again he gave his filthy grin: "Thallium. It was thallium. Do you know what that is?" I knew what thallium was. Thallium is worse than death itself. It eats you from the inside. First your hair falls out, then your hands begin to tremble. It interferes with all of your movements, like Parkinson�s disease in its final stage. The poison isn�t immediately fatal. It destroys you slowly with attacks of fever, paralysis, and impediments of speech and sight. You can hardly eat, you lose control over your sphincters, and you turn into a zombie-the living dead."

Latif Yahia & Karl Wendl

I Was Saddam�s Son

"Psychological torture and physical abuse has been used on Catholic detainees in Northern Ireland. High-frequency sound waves and sensory deprivation research methods that have been outlawed for use on humans by the American Psychological Association were being used to undermine the dignity and destroy the effectiveness of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. The case of one 40-year-old released prisoner has been reported. Upon release, the man's mental and physical condition suggested senility-a condition inconsistent with his health at the time of his internment.

(quote from a DIA report of 31 Jan 1972, 'Controlled Offensive Behavior USSR'

"A further DIA document in my possession, dating from 1976 and titled 'Biological effects of Electro-Magnetic Radiation (Radiowaves and Microwaves) Eurasian Communist Countries', revealed that a wealth of research had been carried out for decades to determine the extent to which the human mind could be manipulated via microwave radiation: 'Subjects exposed to microwave radiation, exhibited a variety of neurasthenic disorders (including) headache, fatigue, drowsiness, depression, anxiety, forgetfulness, and a lack of concentration."

Nicholas Redfern

Cosmic Crashes

"....Incarceration today often means suffering repeated rapes and sexual assaults by other prisoners. The prison authorities do nothing to stop these attacks, which reportedly number in the hundreds of thousands annually. Outside of prison, rape and sexual assault are considered heinous crimes. Inside, they are part of the punishment. If a judge said, "I sentence you to be sexually assaulted on a daily basis" it would be plainly unconstitutional. Yet that is exactly what judges are sentencing many prisoners to endure-without taking responsibility for doing so. Overcrowding, neglect of prisoners' health, and the failure to prevent violence by prisoners against other prisoners have become de facto forms of punishment which could never pass constitutional muster but continue because the U.S. Supreme Court has cut off all avenues by which prisoners can have their rights adjudicated. And many prisoners suffering this form of unconstitutional punishment have not all been convicted of any crime. The Supreme Court has approved "preventive detention"-a flagrantly unconstitutional practice-of a growing number of persons, including juveniles, who are awaiting trial and may well be found innocent. Sometimes an accused person spends several years in prison only to be found not guilty-but this person has been punished and perhaps irrevocably damaged nevertheless."

Charles A Reich

Opposing the System

"Ethically , we are in an age in which there is grave doubt among theologians, philosophers, jurists, and social scientists as to whether any universal principles exist which can be reliably known and used by the international community to define torture or terrorism as wrong. To be sure, many say that terrorism and torture are terrible. But when the question is posed as to whether there are any universal absolutes, or whether there are intrinsically evil acts, or whether there are cross-cultural values which could be the basis for declaring such practices inherently wrong we find only doubt and skepticism."

Max Stackhouse

"There's no absolute right not to be tortured."

-Alan Dershowitz   Harvard Professor

"One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e.., in an existential invitation to life without intermission."

W.H. Auden

The Dyer's Hand

"The healthy man does not torture others-generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers."

-Carl Jung

Collected Works "Return to the Simple Life" 

"The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gnashing with knives, and its whipping with rods-Medievalism is real Christianity and the medieval Christ is the real Christ."

-Oscar Wilde

"I told him ( King Abdullah of Jordan) I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families. I told him I was equally sorry that people who've been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America. I assured him that Americans like didn't appreciate what we saw, that it made us sick to our stomachs."

-President George W. Bush (May 6,2004

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Book: "The Torture Papers" Ed by karen J. Greenberg & Joshua I. Dralel

Book: The Instruments of Torture...by Michael Kerrigan

Book: "History of Punishment and Torture" by Karen Farrington

Book: "Life and Death In Civil War Prisons: The Parallel Torments of Corporal John Wesley Minnich, C.S.A. and Sergeant Warren Lee Gross, U.S.A. by J. Michael Martinez

Book: "The History of Torture and Execution" by Jean Kellaway

Book: "The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth" by Dianna Ortiz with Patricia Davis

Book: "Long Binh Jail: An Oral History of Vietnam's Notorious U.S. Military Prison" by Cecil Barr Currey

Book: "Horror In The East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War Ii" by Laurence Rees