17 Quotes by James Risen

To most of America, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it.

The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.

Mitchell and Jessen were advocating torture tactics that had been originally designed to break men and force them to spout lies and propaganda, but they claimed that these techniques were not torture, and that they would elicit the truth, not lies and propaganda. In the upside-down world of the global war on terror, their explanations were widely accepted.

Between May 2003 and June 2004, while the CPA was in operation, Basel was in charge of all the cash flights and said he never lost a single dollar. All of the cash that arrived at the Baghdad airport got to its destination downtown, he insisted. “Absolutely, all the money I guarded got to where it was supposed to go,” Basel said, emphatically.

Overall, the United States spent $63 billion of its own money on Iraq’s reconstruction throughout the war.

During the darkest years of the Iraq war, between 2004 and 2008, there were at least thirty-five convictions in the United States and more than $17 million in fines, forfeitures, and restitution payments made in fraud cases in connection with the American reconstruction of Iraq. But the midlevel officers, enlisted personnel, contractors, and others who have been caught account for only a tiny slice of the billions that have gone missing in Iraq. The biggest thieves have been far more elusive.

Morgan’s studies show that the use of the SERE simulated torture techniques impairs memory and prompts inaccurate answers from those subjected to the tactics. Mitchell and Jessen’s methods, Morgan said, create a mental state that makes it difficult to remember information accurately – making the credibility of all statements suspect.

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.

KBR went on to become far and away the largest single Pentagon contractor of the entire war, receiving a combined total of $39.5 billion in contracts, according to calculations by the Financial Times in 2013.