“K. Barton Osborn, who served in a covert program of intelligence in Vietnam, not only testified to a wide variety of forms of torture used by U. S. and Saigon personnel, but also made the startling claim that “I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals.””

—  Edward S. Herman

Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, pp. 325-326.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "K. Barton Osborn, who served in a covert program of intelligence in Vietnam, not only testified to a wide variety of fo…" by Edward S. Herman?
Edward S. Herman photo
Edward S. Herman 55
American journalist 1925–2017

Related quotes

“The question of relative atrocities may be illustrated by this fact: a close examination by the author of newspaper files for 1966 alone disclosed somewhere between 600 and 1,000 reported South Vietnamese civilian deaths attributed to “errors” in the use of “allied” firepower. During the same year the number of NLF killings, including paramilitary personnel, according to official Saigon estimates, was 1,000. That is, our acknowledged accidental civilian killings were of the same order of magnitude as official claims of NLF killings. It should be obvious that U. S. bombings and killings in “unfriendly” villages were many times greater than killings by mistake.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities, 1970, p. 58.

C.G. Jung photo

“I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology
Ayn Rand photo

“Remember also that the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

Ayn Rand book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)

Barack Obama photo

“We're also increasing the number of Syrian and other refugees we admit to the U. S. to 100,000 per year for the next two years.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

President Barack Obama on Twitter at September 28, 2015 https://twitter.com/potus/status/648543139196743680
2015

Alan Charles Kors photo

“Government programs once established never end, they just never end. The logic is evermore decision made by government and ever fewer decisions made by individuals. Democracy is an extraordinary thing, but Hitler could've been elected democratically. Democracy is not the same as liberty. It is not the same as individual rights.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

George H. W. Bush photo

“The Government is here to serve, but it cannot replace individual service. And shouldn't all of us who are public servants also set an example of service as private citizens?”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

George Bush: "Remarks to Members of the Senior Executive Service," January 26, 1989. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16628&st
Context: The Government is here to serve, but it cannot replace individual service. And shouldn't all of us who are public servants also set an example of service as private citizens? So, I want to ask all of you, and all the appointees in this administration, to do what so many of you already do: to reach out and lend a hand. Ours should be a nation characterized by conspicuous compassion, generosity that is overflowing and abundant.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“The individual, his character, and his fate are for real. Each individual is different from every other individual who has ever lived or who will ever live. A human life is a dramatic and irreversible movement from birth to death, surrounded by mystery and overshadowed by chance.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 18

Andrew Sullivan photo

“Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U. S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture — "enhanced interrogation techniques" — is a term originally coined enhanced interrogation techniques by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

" 'Verschärfte Vernehmung' http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/verschfte_verne.html#more " The Daily Dish (29 May 2007)

“I was stunned. I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decision of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician’s who made a decision of profound consequence.”

Jack Finney book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1970), Chapter 22 (p. 387)

Alexis De Tocqueville photo

“In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book One, Chapter II.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One

Related topics