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“Mitchell and Jessen’s great achievement was to bend the accepted narrative of how SERE affects the mind and body. They made two important and related claims—that SERE could force prisoners to tell the truth, and that SERE did not constitute torture. The CIA, based in part on the notion that SERE was safe, told the Justice Department that the enhanced interrogation techniques were safe. Based on those assurances, in turn, the Justice Department provided the intelligence community with secret legal opinions stating that the techniques did not constitute torture and were legal.”
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
“KBR won its coveted role in Iraq while it was a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company Vice President Dick Cheney ran before the 2000 presidential campaign. KBR was later spun off from Halliburton, but by then, it was well entrenched with a virtual monopoly over basic services for American troops in Iraq. At the height of the war, KBR had more than fifty thousand personnel and subcontractors working for it in Iraq, making the company’s presence in Iraq larger than that of the British Army.”
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
“President Obama’s decision to launch airstrikes against ISIS in the summer of 2014 raised the potential for a completely new war on terror, without ever having declared an end to the previous one. It also signified a questionable “whack-a-mole” strategy, in which the U.S. targets Islamic militant insurgencies before they ever attack the United States, just in case they might do so in the future. That strategy would almost guarantee that those groups will eventually turn against us, and that the endless war on terror would remain endless.”
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
“The object of terrorism is to use violence or the threat of violence to create fear and alarm,” says Jenkins. “And so terrorism has worked. Certainly, we have been the major contributors to that. We have scared the hell out of ourselves.”
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
“He shook his head no and said, “It is now among us.” Roark also pressed him on the limits of the program, and Hayden suggested that the only real limit had been imposed by Rep. Nancy Pelosi in exchange for going along with the program and maintaining her silence about it. Hayden told Roark that “Pelosi had repeatedly warned him not to go beyond the CT [counterterrorism] target, and for now they were adhering to that.” In other words, the Bush administration and NSA eventually wanted to use the domestic spying program for purposes that had nothing to do with the global war on terror.”
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
― Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
Peer’s 2025 Year in Books
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