Daily Inspiration Quote by Jane Mayer

The sentence turns on a sickening hinge: the moment fear stops being a warning and becomes a permission slip. Mayer isn’t just observing hypocrisy; she’s tracing a moral boomerang. The “worst that could befall our people” evokes the old American nightmare scenario - captured soldiers, hostage videos, coerced confessions - the things we picture as proof of an enemy’s barbarism. Then she flips the camera around. “Used on our people” becomes “we are using,” collapsing distance, forcing the reader to inhabit the role reversal.

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.