Mike Taibbi in Baghdad: ''While the end to the Saddam regime means a return to long-denied freedoms for all Iraqis, it may also mean at least a temporary rollback of some hard-won freedoms for millions of Iraqi women.... While Saddam’s regime brutalized women – rape, torture, even beheadings – his secular government also gave women more rights than their counterparts in many other Islamic countries.'' – NBC Nightly News, April 22.
''Attorney General John Ashcroft has earned himself a remarkable distinction as the Torquemada of American law. Tomas de Torquemada...was largely responsible for... [the] torture and the burning of heretics – Muslims in particular. Now, of course, I am not accusing the attorney general of pulling out anyone’s fingernails or burning people at the stake (at least I don’t know of any such cases). But one does get the sense these days that the old Spaniard’s spirit is comfortably at home in Ashcroft’s Department of Justice.'' – Former CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite in his syndicated column published in the September 22, Philadelphia Inquirer.