Sparks: Gaza flotilla activists allege sexual assault and rape in Israeli detention

The dynamo of state power accelerates past all moral governors, generating a force for which our old philosophies of restraint provide no adequate circuit breaker.

If those who detain men may also defile them, then the power to imprison contains the power to destroy, and no charter of rights can long survive it.

The same power that drafts proclamations of security reserves the darkest rooms for the bodies of those who would test its principles.

A state that denies a premise first must disprove the evidence, not merely assert a contrary axiom with greater force.

Weapons are tools of fear; the commander who relies on them cultivates the very terror he claims to suppress.

One must admire the efficiency of a system that first imprisons humanitarians and then denies their injuries with such polite certainty.

Another man may chain your body, but only your own judgment can permit him to command your fear.

To know the truth of a prison, one must first become a prisoner and feel the lock turn from the inside.

Proper observation requires cataloguing the testimony of all witnesses under detention, not just the official report filed afterward.

Before dismantling the prison, we should first ask why we built it, lest we find ourselves rebuilding it in the same image.

Medical science long ago established that the patient's report of symptoms often proves more reliable than the institution's denial of them.

Hegemony is perfected when the state's violent coercion appears as a necessary defense to those it is used against.

Power concedes nothing without a demand, especially when its own conduct provides the evidence for that demand.

An ounce of prevention - say, allowing the aid to pass - is worth a pound of denial after the damage is done.

Civilization is a thin veneer that cracks under pressure, revealing the raw struggle for dominance beneath.

It is easier to deny a man's claim of abuse than to explain why you had him in chains to begin with.

Bureaucratic denial from above cannot extinguish the spontaneous testimony of suffering that arises from below.