Jane Mayer Quotes
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It was our view of the worst that could befall our people if they were taken captive. So, what was fascinating to me was that somehow it appears the techniques that we have feared most in the world would be used on our people, we are using on people in our custody.
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The Kochs have been activists since the 1970s. You can go back and look at the platform of the Libertarian Party in 1980 and see what they really believe in. They wanted to abolish huge swaths of the U.S. government, including the Internal Revenue Service. They want to get rid of Social Security. They'd like to get rid of Medicare. They'd like to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, which directly affects their business.
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If you have an informed electorate, it makes great choices.
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There have been waves of reform in the past. I see no reason why they wouldn't happen again.
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We would see another president being accused of being illegitimate, and undermined from day one, which is exactly what these donors did to [Barack] Obama.
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Torture is illegal, both in the U.S. and abroad. So - and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration.
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The great unknown in this country is where this leaves the Republican Party after this election. Will it be the party of the Kochs or will it be the party of [Donald] Trump?
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It's hard to look at [Donald] Trump as a hopeful sign because, in his own way, he is offering false solutions to many problems.
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The possibility exists that the Kochs will walk away with even more power if [Donalds] Trump's defeated.
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The world's a small place and people are watching; and, you know, somebody disappears, the family knows and their colleagues know, and so eventually, these things do get out.
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People I've interviewed say they're terrified there may be boycotts of their [the Kochs] products, which include so many household items that everybody's familiar with, things like Stainmaster Carpet and Dixie Cups and Brawny paper towels and Lycra.
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The concern that I have is that, as wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of a few, economic inequality grows, and power also becomes more unequal.
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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.
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The book that I wrote is called Dark Money, and it's about secret spending that is very hard to follow. [George] Soros's whole thing is about government transparency, so he spends very much in the open, and the same with [Tom] Steyer.
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Well, they are critics of the Bush administration generally on the human rights record of the administration, and in particular, they are very, very critical of this use of science.
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I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark.
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I think the scary thing is that there is in place already a sprawling infrastructure of advocacy groups, think tanks, academics and candidates and politicians funded by the Kochs and other deep-pocketed groups on the far right ready to attack Hillary Clinton.
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The Kochs are very much involved in this election, not backing [Donald] Trump but backing everything down the ballot from him. They're pouring money into capturing the Senate and the House of Representatives, and state Houses across the country.
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Let's face it, the subject of campaign finance is not always scintillating. But it's incredibly important.
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Money has much more power down the ballot.
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[The Kochs] they hate big government.
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I kept thinking maybe in the future editions [of Dark Money] I should sell it along with, like, some kind of, you know, Pepto Bismol or something. I wanted it to read a little bit like a thriller, so that it truly grabbed people.
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Donald Trump actually is a pretty big-government conservative. He doesn't see eye-to-eye with them [the Kochs] on trade.
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And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them.
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But there have been many news reports that water-boarding has been used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is one of the major al Qaeda figures that we have in U.S. custody.
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The fear is that we'll move in the direction from being a democracy to an oligarchy.
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There's not as much big money on the left, but you've got George Soros, who has the Open Society Institute. He's pushing liberal policies.
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I would argue that there's been a backlash this year [2016]. They [the Kochs] pushed the [Republican] party too far right. The other thing that the backlash is against is the sense that politicians have been bought and sold.
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David and Charles Koch are pretty much as far right as you can get on the ideological spectrum without falling off. They are far right libertarians, very anti-government, very pro-business, very anti-tax, anti-regulatory, in favour of free markets ruling the day.
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What I write about is how much influence it's had in things like state legislatures and governorships and congressional races. The other thing that's even more important in the long run is that very extreme money has affected the ecosystem of ideology in the country.
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