Guantanamo Quotes

A decision by the Supreme Court to subject Guantanamo to judicial review would eliminate these advantages. ~ John Yoo

It's a good thing I'm not the president, because I would prosecute everybody who was involved in that torture, I would prosecute the people who did it, I would prosecute the people who ordered it and they would all go to jail! Because Torture is against the law! ~ Jesse Ventura

I think Guantanamo, has been synonymous with the staining of American values and American legal tradition. ~ Mark Shields

Long before, and fully independent of, anything Congress did, President Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp. President Obama fully embraced indefinite detention - the defining injustice of Guantanamo - as his own policy. ~ Glenn Greenwald

It was William Penn who said, "Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it." Brent knew that there was nothing right about this place and the way the prisoners were treated, and he was determined to do whatever he could to change that. ~ Kenneth Eade

Someone else knows," I said. "The three most dangerous words in the secrecy business. But there it is. I know, and Ms. Nice knows. Which is why we came back with the RAF. Because where would your plane have landed? Guantanamo, maybe. But it didn't, and we're back in America, free and clear. And we know. I'm sure you could crush Ms. Nice's career, but you'll never find me. I'll always be out there. And you know me, General. You've known me a long time. I don't forgive, and I don't forget. And I won't have to do much. Talking might be enough. Suppose the SVR found out it was you who got Khenkin killed? Some of those IOUs might get canceled. And they might retaliate. Rumors might start, about poor old Tom O'Day, who got so desperate he came up with a cockamamie scheme. ~ Lee Child

We aren't using Guantanamo Bay anymore to take additional terrorists. That was the perfect facility to be able to use to extract information from people to keep the American people safe. ~ Michele Bachmann

It wasn't a conscious decision to actually make a movie about Guantanamo Bay. It was a device. ~ Hayden Schlossberg

In this funny debut, flashy Filipino fashion designer Boy Hernandez sees his American dream become a nightmare when he's ensnared in a terrorist plot and shipped to Guantanamo. Gilvarry nails the couture scene, but Boy's rough journey from Manolo to Gitmo is no joke. ~ Andrew Abrahams

The only subject fewer authentic Americans cared about than the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo was World Cup Soccer. America is an epic global battle with ruthless savages who seek our destruction, and liberals are feeling sorry for the terrorists. ~ Ann Coulter

I voted for Obama. I was very happy when he won. But Obama hasn't really been able to effectively do anything that has made me ... He hasn't helped the environment. He didn't close Guantanamo Bay. He went deeper into Afghanistan. ~ Patti Smith

Keeping this facility [Guantanamo prison] open is contrary to our values. It undermines our standing in the world. It is viewed as a stain on our broader record of upholding the highest standards of rule of law. ~ Audie Cornish

The Justices are currently considering a case, argued last month, which seeks to extend the writ of habeas corpus to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo. ~ John Yoo

During my time here [Guantanamo], as Nelson Mandela says ... the most important thing you have is time to think about things. I came to the conclusion that ... you're not going to gain anything with hate. Second thing, it's more destructive than it's constructive. Third thing: I came to a conclusion that love and forgiveness are more constructive and will bring people together. ~ Omar Khadr

i have to go" "I love you"

Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay ~ Neil Patrick Harris

The world is not kind to whistleblowers - a term of art with particular resonance in football, the most hierarchical and repressive of organized sports, a world of 'systems' and 'programs' and scripted plays, where reading a medical report requires a security clearance, and practice fields are patrolled like Guantanamo Bay. ~ Jane Leavy

Obama and the Democrats were so critical of what Bush did, the interrogations, the secret prisons, Guantanamo and all of that, and even the war on terror. Obama won't use the word. He's made war on the war on terror. ~ Charles Krauthammer

As far as Obama is concerned, the only religion to be "reformed" - which is to say destroyed - is the faith that shaped the West, not the religion of the West's historic adversary. Obama has in effect declared to Christians in America: either bring your understanding of Christianity into line with my liberalism or don't bother entering the public square. You want federal money? Well then, perform abortions, distribute condoms, and hire homosexual activists. He would never dare talk to Muslims in those terms. He gives back ancestral swords to freed Muslims from Guantanamo Bay and hands abortionists' forceps to Christian doctors. ~ Phyllis Schlafly

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. ~ Jane Mayer

General Colin Powell shocked a lot of people in Washington by speaking out against President Bush's policies, saying that the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. That's what I think he said - it was hard to hear him because he was being hustled out of the room to his cell in Guantanamo Bay. ~ Jay Leno

Guantanamo is still open, but it's unlikely that serious torture is going on at Guantanamo. There is just too much inspection. ~ Noam Chomsky

Liberals believe in burning the American flag, urinating on crucifixes, and passing out birth control pills to 11-year-olds without telling their parents
but God forbid an infidel touch a Quran at Guantanamo. ~ Ann Coulter

Each department and institution has its own authorities and responsibilities, and they act on that basis. It is wrong to even compare such actions to what is done in Guantanamo or elsewhere by the Americans. They do not stand on a high moral platform to preach to others. ~ Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

I stand on my public record as a defender of the human rights of Muslims, notably my work for Moazzam Begg and other British Muslims detained without trial in Guantanamo Bay. ~ Hari Kunzru

With the NDAA, his failure to close Guantanamo Bay and the ramping use of drones, President Obama looks suspiciously like President Bush, a man on a quest for American Empire. ~ Justin Sane

An institution like Guantanamo in its present form cannot and must not exist in the long term. We must find different ways of dealing with prisoners. As far as I'm concerned there's no question about that. ~ Angela Merkel

I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. ~ Barack Obama

Anyway, a spokesman for Barack Obama says the prisoners that are released from Guantanamo will either be sent back to their home countries or enter the New York City cab driver training program. ~ Jay Leno

I believe that we need to set conditions to close the detention facility at Guantanamo. This includes retaining the option to transfer detainees from this facility elsewhere ... It is in the U.S.'s national security interest to do so. ~ Pete Visclosky

The entire premise behind the Bush administration's policy of holding 'enemy combatants' in foreign military bases such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was so that neither U.S. domestic law nor American obligations under international law would be applicable. ~ Mark Gibney

Even if you are a liberal in the Muslim world, when you see Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and you see all the other reports of abuses by American forces, it's very hard to get up and say, "We should simulate the American ways," because this is the face of America now in the Muslim world, for many Muslims. ~ Yaroslav Trofimov

I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo. ~ Ann Coulter

Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay. ~ Tom Lantos

And if we capture any of these ISIS killers alive, they are going to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and we're going to find out everything they know, because when I'm president, unlike Barack Obama, we will keep this country safe. ~ Marco Rubio

I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture. ~ Nick Harkaway

Guantanamo allows us to secure dangerous detainees without the risk of escape, while at the same time providing us with valuable intelligence information on how best to proceed in the war against terror and prevent future attacks. ~ Jim Ryun

I performed for the U.S. troops in Guantanamo Bay. And signed autographs for people who've been gone from America for so long they didn't realize that I'm not famous. ~ Mike Birbiglia

How much kinder it would have been, to turn off, like an appliance. The gradual, drawn-out corruption of the body while its host was still trapped inside was a torture of a sort they would have contrived at Guantanamo, or Bergen-Belsen. Every old age was an Edgar Allan Poe story. ~ Lionel Shriver

Until the administration can articulate a coherent and convincing policy for closing Guantanamo, it should remain open. ~ Jason Chaffetz

When I visited Guantanamo Bay several years ago, I met a team of psychiatrists treating the detainees. When I asked how they distinguished between, say, schizophrenia or bipolarity and a bedrock religious commitment to holy war, they couldn't answer. ~ Monica Crowley

American soldiers had to guard prisoners on the inside while receiving mortar and weapons fire from the outside. Guantanamo is distant from any battlefield, making it far more secure. ~ John Yoo

The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people. I mean, these are terrorists for the most part. ~ Dick Cheney

My legislation would cut off all funding for trials of anyone from Guantanamo in any court in the United States of America. This bill would help stop the misguided plan to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 terrorists on trial in Downtown Manhattan. ~ Peter T. King

The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantanamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. ~ Noah Feldman

What made Guantanamo such a travesty - and what still makes it such - is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime. ~ Glenn Greenwald

Yesterday I, along with a bipartisan Congressional Delegation of lawmakers, inspected the detention facilities at Guantanamo used to house individuals detained in the War on Terrorism. ~ Jim Ryun

We'll review President Obama's plan [on closing Guantanamo], but since it includes bringing dangerous terrorists to facilities in U.S. communities, he should know that the bipartisan will of Congress has already been expressed against that proposal. ~ Audie Cornish

What makes Bush different from Hitler? He commits crimes in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons. With all these crimes, they still behave like bullying claimants. They get angry once they see an independant nation. ~ Ali Khamenei

Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time. ~ Irene Khan

Guano-mo, huh? The neo-Nazi concentration camp ~ Kenneth Eade

The effort to blur the lines between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib reflects a deep misunderstanding about the different legal regimes that apply to Iraq and the war against al Qaeda. ~ John Yoo

What has happened at Guantanamo Bay ... does not represent the will of the American people. I'm embarrassed about it, I think its wrong. I think it does give terrorists an unwarranted excuse to use the despicable means to hurt innocent people. ~ Jimmy Carter

If the inmates of Guantanamo want to make their nests in Uruguay, they can do it. ~ Jose Mujica

Most Americans do not own passports. They're not a naturally curious people. If you were to lock an American for sixty years in an empty underground bunker which contained nothing but a woolly tea cosy, the American would not even be curious enough to be tempted to see if the tea cosy would make a serviceable hat. They're far more likely to arrest the tea cosy, intern it illegally in Guantanamo Bay, and then repeatedly anally rape it until such time that it admits that it was actually a member of an al-Qaeda training cell. Even though at the time of the alleged offence the tea cosy was actually working as a shop assistant in a branch of Currys in Wolverhampton. ~ Stewart Lee

I abhor anything that constitutes torture. Water-boarding, it's perfectly clear to me it is torture. I never supported extraordinary rendition to torture, always said that Guantanamo should be closed. There is no clash of ideals and pragmatism there. ~ David Miliband

I have been to Guantanamo. It's a model prison. Is it ideal? No. But we live in a very un-ideal world. ~ Peter T. King

Since 2001, the U.S. government has abandoned its role as a champion of human rights and has perpetrated terrible and illegal abuses in prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, sent prisoners secretly to other nations to be tortured, denied the applicability of the Geneva Convention restraints, and severely restricted time-honored civil liberties within our own country. Certain political leaders of other nations, who are inclined to perpetrate human rights abuses to quiet dissenting voices and were previously restrained by positive influence from Washington, now feel free to emulate or exceed the abuses approved by American leaders. ~ Jimmy Carter

Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty. ~ Thomas Friedman

Obama was expected to restore an ethical sheen to post-9/11 foreign policy, but he has intensified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, pursued whistle-blowers, and failed to close down Guantanamo. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Second, the facility at Guantanamo Bay is necessary to national security. ~ Jeff Miller

One recent menu for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo consisted of orange glazed chicken, fresh fruit crepe, steamed peas and mushrooms, and rice pilaf. Sounds like the sort of thing you'd get at Windows on the World - if it still existed. ~ Ann Coulter

Closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is a promise President [Barack] Obama made it but has yet to fulfill. ~ Audie Cornish

In 'Seven Ancient Wonders,' Jack West and his team break someone out of Guantanamo Bay. I'm not going to preach to people and say, 'Guantanamo Bay, bad', but I will have my hero go and break somebody out of it, and maybe people will think about it that way. ~ Matthew Reilly

If you look at Iraq and Afghanistan's situations, they are quickly becoming much like our reservations. They will have puppet governments funded and controlled by a U.S. Government that siphoned off their resources. You don't have to be an English major to read the writing on the wall; I am in here as a warning to others, just like those men who are in Guantanamo are a warning to others - if you stand up to us you face these same consequences. ~ Leonard Peltier

But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along.164 The United States might call itself "a country of laws, not men," but as we have learned in recent years, American presidents can order torture, assassinations, domestic surveillance programs, even set up extra-legal zones like Guantanamo where they can treat prisoners pretty much any way they choose to. Even on the lowest levels, those who enforce the law are not really subject to it. It's extraordinary difficult, for instance, for a police officer to do anything to an American citizen that would lead to that officer being convicted of a crime.165 ~ David Graeber

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. ~ Jane Mayer

I think we need to understand what we mean when we talk about closure, we don't mean transfer or prosecute which is what many of the critics of Guantanamo would like to see happen. When the US government talks about closing Guantanamo, they talk about moving some set of detainees to some other place where they continue to be detained without charge. ~ Jennifer Daskal

A Conspiracy Theory that took hold was introduced by Anthony "Tony" Summers, the respected author of The Kennedy Conspiracy, published in 1980 and again in 1998 as "Not in Your Lifetime." He believes that anti-Castro activists, funded by Mafia mobsters who had been ousted from Cuba, killed Kennedy. Summers believes that members of the CIA took part in this conspiracy and named the people he suspected. Summers also stated in an article published in the National Enquirer magazine, on October 25, 2013, that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone. The National Enquirer stated that Herminio Diaz, born in Cuba in 1923, had, in 1948, shot Pipi Hernandez, who was a Dominican exile employed at the naval base at Guantanamo. This killing took place at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico. In 1957, he was involved with an assassination attempt against President José Figueres of Costa Rica, who incidentally was a trained Army Ranger and a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.

According to JFKFacts published on May 27, 2014, General Fabián Escalante, the historian of Cuban State Security and Castro's former bodyguard, said that the assassin Herminio Diaz, along with Eladio del Valle and three American mobsters: Richard Gaines, Lenny Patrick, and Dave Yara, were the shooters at Dealey Plaza. ~ Hank Bracker

Obviously this prison has been controversial ever since the first detainees arrived in Guantanamo more than 14 years ago. ~ Audie Cornish

I was most impressed with the professionalism of our soldiers stationed there, and I am now more confident than ever that that the operations at Guantanamo are being conducted in a humane and necessary manner. ~ Jim Ryun

As I detail in my new book: 'Hard Measures, How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,' there are many myths surrounding the detention of a relatively small number of top terrorists at CIA-run 'black sites' from 2002 until they were sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2006. ~ Jose Rodriguez

The great difficulty with Guantanamo is it was perceived correctly as being a place where people were not being detained subject to rules. I don't think the world thinks that you can't detain suspected terrorists - the world thinks you can do that, but you have to do it pursuant to rules and to clear charges. ~ Noah Feldman

Sometimes people decide to write reports even though they haven't been to Guantanamo . And so I would just suggest that people look at some of the work that's been done by people who have been there. But that's not to say that we will not be very glad at the day that conditions permit the closure of Guantanamo and the trying of its inhabitants or for their release. ~ Condoleezza Rice

Should we have border security there? Yes. But the idea of the United States erecting a wall for the world to see makes a lie of everything we say about ourselves. It's a little bit like why the President [Barack Obama] and I feel so strongly about closing Guantanamo. It is inconsistent with who we are. ~ Joe Biden

The United States is holding hundreds of suspected terrorists in prisons at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Many are locked up indefinitely. They have not been tried or even charged with any crime. ~ Stephen Kinzer

If anyone has it rough at Guantanamo, it is the guards. They are constantly harassed and threatened by some of these terrorists. Prisoners tell guards, we know where your families are. We know where your wife is, your children, and we are going to kill them. ~ Robin Hayes

Guantanamo is a chief recruiting tool for al-Qaida. It has put a wedge between the United States and at least some of its allies. ~ Eric Holder

The time has come for President Obama to formally rescind his order to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and end his irresponsible allegations of injustices at the facility, which operates in a framework that respects the rule of law, keeps terrorists off American soil, and bolsters our national security. ~ Jason Chaffetz

Many of the vicious criminals held there have been caught on the battlefield fighting against American troops and shutting down Guantanamo Bay would just require the military to move them elsewhere. ~ Bill Shuster

President Obama has been very clear as he laid out the goal, and the objective is to close Guantanamo. ~ Cliff Sloan

Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses. ~ Linda Chavez