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Everyone is tortured. Do you know anyone who isn't?

As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.

To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

Not all the Americans in Iraq are those who torture and murder, or course they're not, I don't know how many are doing it, I know it is systematic throughout the United States military I think that's been revealed.

Just because I'm talking about something that might have been a sad or painful situation doesn't mean that I'm sad or tortured 24 hours a day any more than anybody else is.

Atrocities are human nature - they don't have political beliefs, color, creed or anything like that. They just happen, it's human.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions.

'We don't torture' is the anguished cry of squishy people who have decided that trying to frighten terrorists by roughing them up is somehow the very definition of torture.