Malcolm Nance Quotes

"SERE is a classified program, but every person informed of it is 'read in' to the details of the program. Even the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which administers SERE, starts its PowerPoint presentation with a slide outlining the agency's origins."

"A militant's profile lies not in his age, race, culture, or education; anyone can join or be adopted by the al Qaeda network, the only prerequisite being a willingness to accept the group's radical, cultlike ideology."

"Al Qaeda has dominated the battlefield of the soul among the disaffected, disenfranchised, and dissatisfied. It promises action instead of discussion."

"Al Qaeda's leaders seek to reverse what they claim are corrupt Islamic practices bookended by the Mongol invasions in 1256 and Ataturk's ending the caliphate in 1924. Theirs is a fight to turn Islam's clock back to the time of Prophet Muhammad's original followers."

"Identifying terrorists on the battlefield is relatively simple."

"Across all U.S. intelligence agencies, there is a lack of cultural respect and a poorly tuned attitude toward foreign peoples and cultures."

"Al Qaeda is a racially diverse organization that is well aware of its dependence on a labor pool dominated by Arab Muslim men. It also has an adaptable and fluid counterintelligence mind-set."

"I have personally led, witnessed, and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people."

"In the media, waterboarding is called 'simulated drowning,' but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning."

"Waterboarding should never be used as an interrogation tool. It is beneath our values."

"I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice."

"As a general rule, interrogations without clearly defined legal limits are brutal. Particularly when they have an imperative to get information out of a captive immediately."

"Working in the Middle East, daily I face the questions, disbelief, and accusations about how Americans could violate the human rights which they once championed."

"For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence."

"Intelligence officers are a peculiar lot. Whether they are active or retired, their brains are wired for a completely different way of seeing the world around them."

"I started my career in Naval Intelligence when I entered as a Russian language interpreter sent to DLI, the Defense Language Institute."

"For years before my Navy enlistment, I had studied the Soviet Union and the KGB's history of political intrigue in preparation for a career in intelligence."

"Hamas and Hezbollah operate within geopolitical norms. They can be negotiated and reasoned with. ISIL is a different animal altogether - a religious cult an order of magnitude more extreme than even the most extreme Islamic groups of the past."

"Yes, ISIL is a terror-based insurgent army that seeks to establish a Caliphate, but the group's actual end goal is far from political: ISIL believes that, through jihad, it will bring about the Day of Judgment. This is not true Islam."

"Referring to ISIL as a destructive religious cult rather than a legitimate theo-political 'radical Islamic' group is not just more accurate, it also exposes ISIL's corrupt religious narrative."