"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"
About this Quote
Her phrasing is deliberately prosecutorial. “It was our view” points to a collective story a nation told itself, a self-image built on vulnerability and righteousness. “Somehow it appears” is the journalist’s restraint: a hedge that reads like disbelief, the calibrated tone of someone documenting what should be impossible. The word “fascinating” lands as acid irony. This isn’t fascination in the tourist sense; it’s the grim attention of a reporter watching institutions rationalize the unthinkable in real time.
Context matters: Mayer’s reporting on post-9/11 detention, interrogation, and the policy apparatus that rebranded cruelty as technique, as “enhanced” procedure. The subtext is about contagion. When a society organizes itself around dread, it starts to mimic what it fears, then sanitizes the mimicry with bureaucracy and euphemism. “People in our custody” is the final twist - a phrase that sounds orderly, even responsible, while naming a power imbalance so total it makes abuse not just possible but system-ready.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Democracy Now!: Methods Developed by U.S. Military (Jane Mayer, 2005)
Evidence:
But these methods, this program was never designed as something that the United States believed was ethical to inflict on other people. 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.. I found the quote in a primary-source interview transcript featuring Jane Mayer speaking on Democracy Now! on July 11, 2005. In that transcript, Amy Goodman identifies Mayer's then-latest New Yorker piece as "The Gitmo Experiment" in the July 11, 2005 issue. Based on the evidence I could verify, the quote was definitely spoken in this interview on July 11, 2005. It may also derive from or paraphrase ideas in Mayer's contemporaneous New Yorker article "The Gitmo Experiment," but I could not verify this exact wording in the article text itself from accessible primary sources. So the earliest verified primary-source appearance I could confirm is this spoken interview. |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Mayer, Jane. (2026, March 11). 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. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-was-our-view-of-the-worst-that-could-befall-142864/
Chicago Style
Mayer, Jane. "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." FixQuotes. March 11, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-was-our-view-of-the-worst-that-could-befall-142864/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"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." FixQuotes, 11 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-was-our-view-of-the-worst-that-could-befall-142864/. Accessed 18 Mar. 2026.
