Words matter. These are the best Malcolm Nance Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Whenever counterterrorism professionals see punditry and media make grand pronunciations on terrorism that defy all demonstrable evidence, an unrepeatable oath is usually muttered.
ISIL is not ‘radical Islam.’ Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, the Muslim Brotherhood – these are radical Islamic groups. They resort to armed struggle and terrorism to move toward their goals. But they are also deeply political organizations that have internal rules, standards, and codes of conduct.
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.
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.
For an old spy and codebreaker like myself, nothing in the world happens by coincidence.
I saw the waterboarding device in Cambodia’s notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh and did not see another until I was strapped down on an identical one at SERE. Waterboarding was administered as a ‘stress demonstrator’ to show that an enemy could make one say anything. And one does.
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.
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.
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.
It annoys me right-wing extremism is not equated to Islamic extremism.
Identifying terrorists on the battlefield is relatively simple.
I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice.
There are no military options for Iran. Attack them, and they will destroy the Gulf States oil industries, rain hundreds of missiles onto Israel, close the Arabian Gulf, and shoot oil prices to $300 per barrel, which could cause our own economic downfall.
Osama bin Laden has managed to replace fear of God and adherence to the Quran with his philosophy of jihad above all else. What’s behind that facade is the true philosophical intentions of al Qaeda: the establishment of a new Islamic caliphate that will defeat democracy as the greater of the two political orders.
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.
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.
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 has dominated the battlefield of the soul among the disaffected, disenfranchised, and dissatisfied. It promises action instead of discussion.
Waterboarding should never be used as an interrogation tool. It is beneath our values.
Vladimir Putin is creating an axis of authoritarian regimes that he will lead.
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.
I have personally led, witnessed, and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people.
We created NATO. It was a United States invention for the collective security of Europe. It has been a Russian desire since 1947 to break up NATO.
I’ve been involved in air strikes against Syria and operations against Syria numerous times in my career.
The goals of Russia since 1917 have been to destroy capitalism, discredit democracy, and show that Communist collectivism was the greatest social and political system in the world.
Russia’s a small country. It’s really poor. It has nothing other than oil and weapons sales.
The Republicans want an autocracy where the rights of minorities and others are not protected.
Vladimir Putin understood, from the Communist era when he was a KGB officer, that the Russian propaganda system of targeting Western media – that in the digital world, you could easily pull the Western media around by a nose ring.
We have already seen ISIS use Donald Trump in their propaganda directly. I mean, I will go so far as to say Donald Trump is the ISIS candidate.
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.
Republicans are so taken by and loyal to Trump that they will believe and do anything he says.
One of the most missed components of the entire insurgency in Iraq was that Syria and Bashar al-Assad facilitated Al Qaeda’s operations in Iraq. They actually headquartered the Iraq Ba’ath Party and all of their escaped generals in Damascus.
