The Davis debate

THE stakes in the Raymond Davis saga are getting higher with each passing day. The US president has now himself claimed publicly that Mr Davis has immunity, and sent over Senator John Kerry to assert the same. This question is, however, far from clear-cut. For one, the actual role of Mr Davis here still remains murky. Even if one assumes he was performing consular
or diplomatic duties, the Vienna Convention provides different levels of immunity to various foreign representatives. According to the State Department’s own guidelines for American law-enforcement personnel, consular employees, for example, have more limited protection than embassy staff. This becomes doubly important when one considers the seriousness of the crime: Mr Davis killed two men in a gruesome act of murder, and, according to the police, not in self-defence. Given all these complexities, the US administration may be going too far in
its insistence that he has blanket immunity.
On the other hand, the Pakistani government has stated no clear view on the topic more than 20 days after the incident, and in the Lahore High Court on Thursday sought another three weeks to determine its stance. Given what is at stake in terms of US-Pakistan relations, and the opportunity that time will provide to conservative elements to fan anti-American sentiment, more urgency is needed. The PPP information
secretary added to the drama by claiming that Mr Davis had immunity and later stating that the view was her own, not that of the party.
Meanwhile, the former foreign minister and unnamed officials have claimed the government has already determined that Raymond Davis does not have blanket immunity. Mr Qureshi also said that a ‘third institution’ was present in the meeting where this finding was supposedly discussed, leading to speculation about the involvement of state institutions that should not normally be a part of such decisions. With all its claims and counterclaims, the Davis case has become an embarrassing example of delayed government action, irresponsible statements by current and
former government officials and speculation about the government’s
independence.
A more sensible handling of the problem is urgently needed from all parties. The US must ease pressure on the Pakistani government and judicial system as they determine the question of Mr Davis’s immunity. The Foreign Office and the law ministry should speed up this process to limit the drama being played out on the world stage and the possibility of right-wing elements exploiting it. Meanwhile, current and former government officials — as well as sections of the media — need to avoid fanning the flames of speculation that result from irresponsible statements and complicate the situation even further.


by Down news paper

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US Predator Drone Strikes Violate Just War Doctrinal Principles

Editor's NOTE:

Predator Drone remote controlled missile attacks are inherently immoral. Their use violates the Just War Doctrinal Corpus in multiple ways. For example;  a war is always unjust if there is an obvious lack of proportionality either because the "means" employed are grossly unsuited (read overkill here) to the "end" desired and or where the means selected or the risks taken-on by one side are clearly unmatched by the other.

The pilot of a remote controlled Drone capable of directing guided missiles against a presumed enemy faces no bodily harm in carrying out an attack, that is to say has nothing to lose due to his/her remote location. Moreover, there is no way to be confident to a moral degree of certainty that the target is in fact an enemy combatant. In many cases, innocent civilians have been killed or seriously injured. This is foreseeable, quite predictable and therefore immoral.

The United States at a minimum should discontinue the use of Predator Drone offensive attacks on the grounds that they are inherently immoral that is, morally repugnant in principle not to mention likely to create more enemies than could ever be neutralized by their use.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert


Inside the Killing Machine

President Obama is ordering a record number of Predator strikes. An exclusive interview with a man who approved ‘lethal operations.’

By Tara Mckelvey



February 15, 2011 "Newsweek" - -- It was an ordinary-looking room located in an office building in northern Virginia. The place was filled with computer monitors, keyboards, and maps. Someone sat at a desk with his hand on a joystick. John A. Rizzo, who was serving as the CIA’s acting general counsel, hovered nearby, along with other people from the agency. Together they watched images on a screen that showed a man and his family traveling down a road thousands of miles away. The vehicle slowed down, and the man climbed out.

A moment later, an explosion filled the screen, and the man was dead. “It was very businesslike,” says Rizzo. An aerial drone had killed the man, a high-level terrorism suspect, after he had gotten out of the vehicle, while members of his family were spared. “The agency was very punctilious about this,” Rizzo says. “They tried to minimize collateral damage, especially women and children.”

The broad outlines of the CIA’s operations to kill suspected terrorists have been known to the public for some time—including how the United States kills Qaeda and Taliban militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan. But the formal process of determining who should be hunted down and “blown to bits,” as Rizzo puts it, has not been previously reported. A look at the bureaucracy behind the operations reveals that it is multilayered and methodical, run by a corps of civil servants who carry out their duties in a professional manner. Still, the fact that Rizzo was involved in “murder,” as he sometimes puts it, and that operations are planned in advance in a legalistic fashion, raises questions.

More than a year after leaving the government, Rizzo, a bearded, elegant 63-year-old who wears cuff links and pale yellow ties, discussed his role in the CIA’s “lethal operations” with me over Côtes du Rhone and steak in a Washington restaurant. At times, Rizzo sounded cavalier. “It’s basically a hit list,” he said. Then he pointed a finger at my forehead and pretended to pull a trigger. “The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head.”

The number of such killings, carried out mostly by Predators in Pakistan, has increased dramatically during the Obama administration, and these covert actions have become an integral part of U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

How CIA staffers determine whether to target someone for lethal operations is a relatively straightforward, and yet largely unknown, story. The president does not review the individual names of people; Rizzo explains that he was the one who signed off. People in Washington talk about a “target list,” as former undersecretary of state Richard Armitage described the process at a recent event in Washington. In truth, there is probably no official CIA roster of those who are slated to die. “I never saw a list,” says a State Department official who has been involved in discussions about lethal operations, speaking without attribution because of the nature of the subject. Officials at the CIA select targets for “neutralization,” he explains. “There were individuals we were searching for, and we thought, it’s better now to neutralize that threat,” he says.

The military and the CIA often pursue the same targets—Osama bin Laden, for example—but handle different regions of the world. Sometimes they team up—or even exchange jobs. When former CIA officer Henry A. Crumpton was in Afghanistan after 9/11, he and Gen. Stanley McChrystal—the former head of Joint Special Operations Command, a secretive military unit—worked closely together, and so did their subordinates. “Some of the people I knew and who worked for me went to work for him—and vice versa,” recalls Crumpton.

Some counterterrorism experts say that President Obama and his advisers favor a more aggressive approach because it seems more practical—thatadministration officials prefer to eliminate terrorism suspects rather than detain them. “Since the U.S. political and legal situation has made aggressive interrogation a questionable activity anyway, there is less reason to seek to capture rather than kill,” wrote American University’s Kenneth Anderson, author of an essay on the subject that was read widely by Obama White House officials. “And if one intends to kill, the incentive is to do so from a standoff position because it removes potentially messy questions of surrender.”

In defense of a hard-nosed approach, administration officials say the aerial-drone strikes are wiping out al Qaeda militants and reducing the chances of another terrorist attack. They have also been careful to reassure the public that the killings are legal. When NEWSWEEK asked the administration for comment, a U.S. official who declined to be identified addressing such a sensitive subject said: “These CT [counterterrorism] operations are conducted in strict accordance with American law and are governed by legal guidance provided by the Department of Justice.”

Explains Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, “We’re not in kindergarten on this anymore: we’ve been doing this since 2001, and there’s a well-established protocol.”

A Los Angeles Times article once described John Rizzo as “the most influential career lawyer in CIA history,” and he arguably knows more than anyone else in the government about the legal aspects of the CIA’s targeted killings. But he stumbled into the world of espionage almost by accident. He graduated from George Washington University Law School and was living in D.C. in the 1970s when the Church committee released its report on the CIA’s attempts to assassinate foreign leaders. Rizzo sensed an opportunity: “With all that going on, they’d need lawyers.” He got a CIA job soon afterward.

Decades later, as the CIA’s interrogations and lethal operations were ramped up after 9/11, Rizzo found himself at the center of controversy. He was, as he puts it, “up to my eyeballs” in President Bush’s program of enhanced interrogations in the so-called black sites, or secret prisons, located in Afghanistan and in other countries. Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo wrote the infamous “torture memo” of August 2002 because Rizzo had asked for clarification about techniques that could be used on detainees. Rizzo had once hoped to become the CIA’s general counsel, but members of the Senate intelligence committee balked because of the role he played in authorizing the interrogations. Rizzo retired in 2009.

Today, Rizzo can sometimes sound boastful. “How many law professors have signed off on a death warrant?” he asks. He is quick to emphasize that the groundwork was prepared in a judicious manner, and felt it important that he observe the killing of some of the high-level terrorism suspects via live footage shown in CIA offices. “I was concerned that it be done in the cleanest possible way,” he explains.

Clean, but always morally complex. Rizzo would sometimes find himself sitting in his office on the seventh floor of the CIA building with a cable about a terrorism suspect in front of him, and he would wonder how his Irish-Italian parents would feel about his newly assigned duties.

After President Bush authorized the CIA to hunt down al Qaeda fighters in the wake of 9/11, “the attorneys were always involved, but they were very good—very aggressive and helpful, in fact,” says Crumpton. “They would help us understand international law and cross-border issues, and they would interpret specific language of the presidential directive.”

Under another Bush order, signed several years later, a variety of people who worked in terrorist camps could be targeted, and not just named terrorism suspects; at that point, the pool of potential candidates reviewed by CIA lawyers became much larger. Despite the secrecy surrounding these orders, their scope has become clear. “The authority given in these presidential findings is surely the most sweeping and most lethal since the founding of the CIA,” William C. Banks, director of Syracuse University’s Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, told a House committee.

The hub of activity for the targeted killings is the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, where lawyers—there are roughly 10 of them, says Rizzo—write a cable asserting that an individual poses a grave threat to the United States. The CIA cables are legalistic and carefully argued, often running up to five pages. Michael Scheuer, who used to be in charge of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, describes “a dossier,” or a “two-page document,” along with “an appendix with supporting information, if anybody wanted to read all of it.” The dossier, he says, “would go to the lawyers, and they would decide. They were very picky.” Sometimes, Scheuer says, the hurdles may have been too high. “Very often this caused a missed opportunity. The whole idea that people got shot because someone has a hunch—I only wish that was true. If it were, there would be a lot more bad guys dead.”

Sometimes, as Rizzo recalls, the evidence against an individual would be thin, and high-level lawyers would tell their subordinates, “You guys did not make a case.” “Sometimes the justification would be that the person was thought to be at a meeting,” Rizzo explains. “It was too squishy.” The memo would get kicked back downstairs.

The cables that were “ready for prime time,” as Rizzo puts it, concluded with the following words: “Therefore we request approval for targeting for lethal operation.” There was a space provided for the signature of the general counsel, along with the word “concurred.” Rizzo says he saw about one cable each month, and at any given time there were roughly 30 individuals who were targeted. Many of them ended up dead, but not all: “No. 1 and No. 2 on the hit parade are still out there,” Rizzo says, referring to “you-know-who and [Ayman al-] Zawahiri,” a top Qaeda leader.

As administration critics have pointed out, government officials have to go through a more extensive process in order to obtain permission to wiretap someone in this country than to make someone the target of a lethal operation overseas.

Rizzo seems bitter that he and other CIA officials have been criticized for authorizing harsh interrogations under Bush, and yet there has been little outcry over the faster pace of lethal operations under Obama. (From 2004 to 2008, Bush authorized 42 drone strikes, according to the New America Foundation. The number has more than quadrupled under President Obama—to 180 at last count.)

The detainees, by and large, survived, Rizzo observes; today, high-level terrorism suspects often do not.

And for all the bureaucratic review, it’s not always precise in the real world. In December people took to the streets of Islamabad to protest the strikes and to show support for a Waziristan resident, Karim Khan, whose son and brother were killed in a strike in 2009 and has filed a lawsuit against the U.S., charging a CIA official for their deaths.

Administration officials insist that the targeted killings rest on a solid legal foundation, but many scholars disagree. Georgetown University’s Gary Solis, the author of The Law of Armed Conflict, says people at the CIA who pilot unmanned aerial vehicles are civilians directly engaged in hostilities, an act that makes them “unlawful combatants” and possibly subject to prosecution.

These days, Rizzo is working on a memoir. He does not talk about the morality of what he did—he is not that kind of guy—but lately has been trying to come to terms with the implications of the deadly task he performed, and which others are now performing in that office building in Virginia.

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Is The Army Tightening Its Grip On Egypt?

By Robert Fisk

February 14, 2011 "The Independent" - -Two days after millions of Egyptians won their revolution against the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the country's army – led by Mubarak's lifelong friend, General Mohamed el-Tantawi – further consolidated its power over Egypt yesterday, dissolving parliament and suspending the constitution. As they did so, the prime minister appointed by Mubarak, ex-General Ahmed Shafiq, told Egyptians that his first priorities were "peace and security" to prevent "chaos and disorder" – the very slogan uttered so often by the despised ex-president. Plus ça change?

In their desperation to honour the 'military council's' promise of Cairo-back-to-normal, hundreds of Egyptian troops – many unarmed – appeared in Tahrir Square to urge the remaining protesters to leave the encampment they had occupied for 20 days. At first the crowd greeted them as friends, offering them food and water. Military policemen in red berets, again without weapons, emerged to control traffic. But then a young officer began lashing demonstrators with a cane – old habits die hard in young men wearing uniforms – and for a moment there was a miniature replay of the fury visited upon the state security police here on 28 January.

It reflected a growing concern among those who overthrew Mubarak that the fruits of their victory may be gobbled up by an army largely composed of generals who achieved their power and privilege under Mubarak himself. No-one objects to the dissolution of parliament since Mubarak's assembly elections last year – and all other years -- were so transparently fraudulent. But the 'military council' gave no indication of the date for the free and fair elections which Egyptians believed they had been promised. The suspension of the constitution – a document which the millions of demonstrators anyway regarded as a laissez-passer for presidential dictatorship – left most Egyptians unmoved. And the army, having received the fulsome thanks of Israel for promising to honour the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, announced that it would hold power for only six months; no word, though, on whether they could renew their military rule after that date.

But a clear divergence is emerging between the demands of the young men and women who brought down the Mubarak regime and the concessions – if that is what they are – that the army appears willing to grant them. A small rally at the side of Tahrir Square yesterday held up a series of demands which included the suspension of Mubarak's old emergency law and freedom for political prisoners. The army has promised to drop the emergency legislation "at the right opportunity", but as long as it remains in force, it gives the military as much power to ban all protests and demonstrations as Mubarak possessed; which is one reason why those little battles broke out between the army and the people in the square yesterday.

As for the freeing of political prisoners, the military has remained suspiciously silent. Is this because there are prisoners who know too much about the army's involvement in the previous regime? Or because escaped and newly liberated prisoners are returning to Cairo and Alexandria from desert camps with terrible stories of torture and executions by – so they say – military personnel. An Egyptian army officer known to 'The Independent' insisted yesterday that the desert prisons were run by military intelligence units who worked for the interior ministry – not for the ministry of defence.

As for the top echelons of the state security police who ordered their men – and their faithful 'baltagi' plain-clothes thugs -- to attack peaceful demonstrators during the first week of the revolution, they appear to have taken the usual flight to freedom in the Arab Gulf. According to an officer in the Cairo police criminal investigation department whom I spoke to yesterday, all the officers responsible for the violence which left well over 300 Egyptians dead have fled Egypt with their families for the emirate of Abu Dhabi. The criminals who were paid by the cops to beat the protesters have gone to ground – who knows when their services might next be required? – while the middle-ranking police officers wait for justice to take its course against them. If indeed it does.

All this, of course, depends on the size of the archives left behind by the regime and the degree to which the authorities, currently the army, are prepared to make these papers available to a new and reformed judiciary. As for the city police, who hid in their police stations before they were burned down on 28th January, they turned up at the interior ministry in Cairo yesterday to demand better pay. That the police should now become protesters themselves – they are indeed to receive pay rises – was one of the more imperishable moments of post-revolutionary Egypt.

Now, of course, it is Egypt's turn to watch the effects of its own revolution on its neighbours. Scarcely a family in Egypt was unaware yesterday of the third day of protests against the president in Yemen and the police violence which accompanied them. And it is remarkable that just as Arab protesters mimic their successful counterparts in Egypt, the state security apparatus of each Arab regime faithfully follows the failed tactics of Mubarak's thugs (Editor's bold emphasis throughout).


Another irony has dawned on Egyptians. Those Arab dictators which claim to represent their people – Algeria comes to mind, and Libya, and Morocco – have signally failed to represent their people by not congratulating Egypt on its successful democratic revolution. To do so, needless to say, would be to saw off the legs of their own thrones.

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The Shame Of Being An American...

By Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research
February 15, 2011 

The United States government has overestimated the amount of shame that it and American citizens can live down. On February 15 “the indispensable people” had to suffer the hypocrisy of the U.S. Secretary of State delivering a speech about America’s commitment to Internet freedom while the U.S. Department of Justice (sic) brought unconstitutional action against Twitter to reveal any connection between WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, the American hero who, in keeping with the U.S. Military Code, exposed U.S. government war crimes and who is being held in punishing conditions not permitted by the U.S. Constitution. The corrupt U.S. government is trying to create a “conspiracy” case against Julian Assange in order to punish him for revealing U.S. government documents that prove beyond every doubt the mendacity of the U.S. government.

This is pretty bad, but it pales in comparison to the implications revealed on February 15 in the British newspaper, The Guardian. The Guardianobtained an interview with “Curveball,” the source for Colin Powell’s speech of total lies to the United Nations about Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Colin Powell’s speech created the stage for the illegal American invasion of Iraq. The Guardian describes “Curveball” as “the man who pulled off one of the greatest confidence tricks in the history of modern intelligence.” As The Guardian puts it, “Curveball” “manufactured a tale of dread.”

U.S. “intelligence” never interviewed “Curveball.” The Americans started a war based on second-hand information given to them by incompetent German intelligence, which fell for “Curveball’s” lies that today German intelligence disbelieves.

As the world now knows, Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The Bush/Cheney Regime, of course, knew this, but “Curveball’s” lies were useful to their undeclared agenda. In his interview with The Guardian, “Curveball,” Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, admitted that he made the whole story up. He wanted to do in Saddam Hussein and told whatever fantasy lie he could make up that would serve his purpose.

If the Bush/Cheney Regime had really believed that Saddam Hussein had world-threatening weapons of mass destruction, it would have been a criminal act to concentrate America’s invading force in a small area of Kuwait where a few WMD could have wiped out the entire U.S. invasion force, thus ending the war before it began.

Some Americans are so thoughtless that they would say that Saddam Hussein would never have used the weapons, because we would have done this and that to Iraq, even nuking Baghdad. But why would Saddam Hussein care if he and his regime were already marked for death? Why would a doomed man desist from inflicting an extraordinary defeat on the American Superpower, thus encouraging Arabs everywhere?

Moreover, if Saddam Hussein was unwilling to use his WMD against an invading force, when would he ever use them? It was completely obvious to the U.S. government that no such weapons existed. The weapons inspectors made that completely clear to the Bush/Cheney Regime. There were no Iraqi WMD, and everyone in the U.S. government was apprised of that fact.

Why was there no wonder or comment in the “free” media that the White House accused Iraq of possession of terrible weapons of mass destruction, but nevertheless concentrated its invasion force in such a small area that such weapons could easily have wiped out the invading force?

Does democracy really exist in a land where the media is incompetent and the government is unaccountable and lies through its teeth every time if opens its mouth?

“Curveball” represents a new level of immorality. Rafid al-Janabi shares responsibility for one million dead Iraqis, 4 million displaced Iraqis, a destroyed country, 4,754 dead American troops, 40,000 wounded and maimed American troops, $3 trillion of wasted US resources, every dollar of which is a debt burden to the American population and a threat to the dollar as reserve currency, ten years of propaganda and lies about terrorism and al Qaeda connections, an American "war on terror" that is destroying countless lives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and which has targeted Iran, and which has destroyed the Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, and the civil liberties that they guarantee. And the piece of lying excrement, Rafid al-Janabi, is proud that he brought Saddam Hussein's downfall at such enormous expense.

Now that Rafid al-Janabi is revealed in The Guardian interview, how safe is he? There are millions of Iraqis capable of exterminating him for their suffering, and tens of thousands of Americans whose lives have been ruined by Rafid al-Janabi’s lies.

Why does the U.S. government pursue Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for telling the truth when “Curveball,” whose lies wiped out huge numbers of people along with America’s reputation, thinks he can start a political party in Iraq?  (Editor's bold emphasis throughout) If the piece of excrement, Rafid al-Janabi, is not killed the minute he appears in Iraq, it will be a miracle.

So we are left to contemplate that a totally incompetent American government has bought enormous instability to its puppet states in the Middle East, because it desperately wanted to believe faulty “intelligence” from Germany that an immoralist provided evidence that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

And America is a superpower, an indispensable nation.

What a total joke!

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'I lied about WMD to topple Saddam'

The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," he said. "They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

The admission comes just after the eighth anniversary of Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in which the then-US secretary of state relied heavily on lies that Janabi had told the German secret service, the BND. It also follows the release of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs, in which he admitted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction programme.

The careers of both men were seriously damaged by their use of Janabi's claims, which he now says could have been – and were – discredited well before Powell's landmark speech to the UN on 5 February 2003.

The former CIA chief in Europe Tyler Drumheller describes Janabi's admission as "fascinating", and said the emergence of the truth "makes me feel better". "I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now," said Drumheller.

In the only other at length interview Janabi has given he denied all knowledge of his supposed role in helping the US build a case for invading Saddam's Iraq.

In a series of meetings with the Guardian in Germany where he has been granted asylum, he said he had told a German official, who he identified as Dr Paul, about mobile bioweapons trucks throughout 2000. He said the BND had identified him as a Baghdad-trained chemical engineer and approached him shortly after 13 March of that year, looking for inside information about Saddam's Iraq.

"I had a problem with the Saddam regime," he said. "I wanted to get rid of him and now I had this chance."

He portrays the BND as gullible and so eager to tease details from him that they gave him a Perry's Chemical Engineering Handbook to help communicate. He still has the book in his small, rented flat in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany.

"They were asking me about pumps for filtration, how to make detergent after the reaction," he said. "Any engineer who studied in this field can explain or answer any question they asked."

Janabi claimed he was first exposed as a liar as early as mid-2000, when the BND travelled to a Gulf city, believed to be Dubai, to speak with his former boss at the Military Industries Commission in Iraq, Dr Bassil Latif.

The Guardian has learned separately that British intelligence officials were at that meeting, investigating a claim made by Janabi that Latif's son, who was studying in Britain, was procuring weapons for Saddam.

That claim was proven false, and Latif strongly denied Janabi's claim of mobile bioweapons trucks and another allegation that 12 people had died during an accident at a secret bioweapons facility in south-east Baghdad.

The German officials returned to confront him with Latif's version. "He says, 'There are no trucks,' and I say, 'OK, when [Latif says] there no trucks then [there are none],'" Janabi recalled.

He said the BND did not contact him again until the end of May 2002. But he said it soon became clear that he was still being taken seriously.

He claimed the officials gave him an incentive to speak by implying that his then pregnant Moroccan-born wife may not be able to travel from Spain to join him in Germany if he did not co-operate with them. "He says, you work with us or your wife and child go to Morocco."

The meetings continued throughout 2002 and it became apparent to Janabi that a case for war was being constructed. He said he was not asked again about the bioweapons trucks until a month before Powell's speech.

After the speech, Janabi said he called his handler at the BND and accused the secret service of breaking an agreement that they would not share anything he had told them with another country. He said he was told not to speak and placed in confinement for around 90 days.

With the US now leaving Iraq, Janabi said he was comfortable with what he did, despite the chaos of the past eight years and the civilian death toll in Iraq, which stands at more than 100,000.

"I tell you something when I hear anybody – not just in Iraq but in any war – [is] killed, I am very sad. But give me another solution. Can you give me another solution?

"Believe me, there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq. There were no other possibilities."


By: The Guardian

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14

When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.
Bruce Beresford 

Where Joe was more vocal and emotional whereas Chuck was very reserved. But, both of them executed great strategy and both of them demanded a lot of their players.
Franco Harris 

Whether we like it or not, men and women are not the same in nature, temperament, emotions and emotional responses.
Paul Getty 

While they would have provided financial support if I had needed it, the greatest support my parents gave was emotional, psychological.
Judd Nelson 

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
Steven Pinker 

Yes, but Hollywood is the strangest place in that they'll torpedo their own film to prove an emotional point.
Richard Linklater 

You can go crazy and play solos in the right place, and that's great because it can intensify and bring an emotional lift. But the thing is you don't want to get in the way of the song.
Benmont Tench 

You can have financial strength, professional strength, emotional strength but for me without spiritual strength none of the rest of it matters.
Star Jones 

You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.
Joni Mitchell 

You have to follow every melodic line, every emotional idea, or you don't get your money's worth.
Kristin Hersh 

You know the first time I sat in the chair I felt anything but up, it was very emotional for me. I had a chair in my hotel room, a chair at rehearsal, and I was trying to spend as much time as I could in the chair.
Gregory Hines 

You know, comedy's hard. With drama, you have a responsibility to the emotional truth, but with comedy, you have emotional truth and you have technique on top of it.
Julianne Moore 

You know, I've sung a lot of emotional songs in my life, but when you're writing it yourself, it's very difficult to decide what to reveal.
Diana Krall 

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
Aldous Huxley 

You're over there in the corner either thinking about the dead dog or whatever, you're bringing up your personal life and you need the space, and then somebody throws you a joke. Especially if it's an emotional scene, you don't want the joke.
Marcia Gay Harden 

Your emotional life is not written in cement during childhood. You write each chapter as you go along.
Harry Stack Sullivan 

Your political reputation affects how likely allies are to trust you, and what kind of deals they'll offer at the negotiating table. There's also some emotional response in there, so factions do bear grudges. Just like the real thing.
Mike Simpson

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13

To work with a director that has emotional commitment and passion toward the characters, and the piece, and the experiences, it only enriches your work.
Jessica Lange 

U2 is an original species... there are colours and feelings and emotional terrain that we occupy that is ours and ours alone.
Bono 

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.
Steven Bochco 

Watching Jodie on this is incredible; it's the perfect role for her. It's so intense and so emotional. She just jumped right into it and is so professional.
Erika Christensen 

We can't forget what happened on May 4th, 1970, when four students gave up their lives because they had the American constitutional right of peaceful protest. They gave up their lives. And to sing that song in that spot on that anniversary was very emotional for us.
Graham Nash 

We expert teachers know that motivation and emotional impact are what matter.
Donald Norman 

We must become acquainted with our emotional household: we must see our feelings as they actually are, not as we assume they are. This breaks their hypnotic and damaging hold on us.
Vernon Howard 

We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex.
Marion Zimmer Bradley 

We're not that far from being able to plant images, memories, and emotional states directly into the brain.
Douglas Trumbull 

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.
Thomas Lynch 

Well, softness and femininity like yours people don't expect of me; so when they find me emotional and capable of real vulnerability, they're surprised.
Faye Dunaway 

What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.
Annie Leibovitz 

When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans.
Elizabeth Moon 

When I got back I found myself being very emotional about the time spent in Rwanda in a way that I hadn't been able to or allowed myself to be when we were there.
Hugh Dancy 

When I heard Aretha, I could feel her emotional delivery so clearly. It came from down deep within. That's what I wanted to do.
Whitney Houston 

When I went on to write my next book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills.
Daniel Goleman 

When it comes to accepting emotional support or affection, I'm a little guarded and hardened to that.
Patricia Heaton 

When my body is strong, I feel stronger inside. I feel more capable of handling emotional situations. Usually I'm more of a inside-out person, but this was a great case of me from the outside in.
Mariska Hargitay 

When people are afraid, they make emotional decisions.
John Mellencamp 

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.
Bertrand Russell 

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12

The title came rather early in one of Ringo's more tired and emotional moments.
Richard Lester 

The two things that matter the most to me: emotional resonance and rocket launchers. Party of Five, a brilliant show, and often made me cry uncontrollably, suffered ultimately from a lack of rocket launchers.
Joss Whedon 

The underlying message of the Lancet article is that if you want to understand aggressive behaviour in children, look to the social and emotional environment in which they are growing up, and the values they bring to the viewing experience.
Hugh Mackay 

The voice collects and translates your bad physical health, your emotional worries, your personal troubles.
Placido Domingo 

The world is changing and the physical barriers are down now. It's time for the emotional barriers to go down. And what better place to start than school?
Laura San Giacomo 

The writing of a melody is an emotional moment; success doesn't make it easy.
Enya 

There are all kinds of other things I could do, things I would probably like, but only acting would give me emotional fulfillment.
Mira Sorvino 

There are realities we all share, regardless of our nationality, language, or individual tastes. As we need food, so do we need emotional nourishment: love, kindness, appreciation, and support from others.
J. Donald Walters 

There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
Ethel Waters 

There was tremendous emotion. Every shift was so emotional.
Marcel Dionne 

There were time when I was into method acting that I did have moments of residual character emotions, because the method bases your emotional responses as a character on emotional experiences from your real life.
Corin Nemec 

There's a whole lot of songs that men just can't do. The words are from another time and represent too much of an emotional commitment, whereas women can say that because of who they are.
Boz Scaggs 

There's so much of, it could have been a very critical examination of what happened, and really the emotional lives of the people involved sort of carry the characters forward.
Jeremy Northam 

There's usually a rhythm and a melody in my head, and that creates an emotional state.
Stephan Jenkins 

These people are amazing. It's so emotional I was thinking about wearing waterproof mascara.
Victoria Beckham 

These sorts of things can happen, identities can be switched, the emotional implications are something that he has not been trained to feel. His whole life has been about separating himself from these sorts of actions.
Atom Egoyan 

They are very personal, emotional songs - people react to them very strongly.
Sarah McLachlan 

They kind of took it out of our hands. We're still able to deal with him on an emotional level.
Rosario Dawson 

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
Alfred Adler 

To explore different parts of yourself and different emotional lives... not to hide from who you are but to actually explore who you are.
Ian Somerhalder 

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11

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.
Kate Millett 

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.
Daniel Goleman 

The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It's a girl.
Shirley Chisholm 

The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.
Francis Ford Coppola 

The estimated loss of up to six million dead is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and on the squaring of accounts with the defeated.
Franjo Tudjman 

The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences.
Sarah Caldwell 

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
E. M. Forster 

The famous saying 'God is love', it is generally assumed, means that God is like our immediate emotional indulgence, not that the meaning of love ought to have something of the 'otherness' and terror of God.
Charles Williams 

The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.
Alfred Adler 

The human voice is the first and most natural musical instrument, also the most emotional.
Klaus Schulze 

The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life - mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical.
Julius Erving 

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.
Martin Luther King, Jr. 

The movie business is very much like that: people in authority making purely emotional decisions instead of interesting rational ones.
Bill Forsyth 

The other thing is we have an incredible villain. And we worked very hard to have villains that are connected to the hero. They have an effect, an emotional effect. They never become out-of-this-world, crazy villains.
Avi Arad 

The relationships that people have - that are sexual, psychological, emotional - these relationships are not open to supervision by parents, schools, churches, or government. Nobody has any right to intervene at all in any kind of relationship like that.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair 

The rich get richer. Not only because they have surpluses with which to invest, but because of the overriding emotional release they experience from having wealth.
Stuart Wilde 

The school made it very clear that women were entitled to positions of authority. That sense of entitlement allowed us to feel that we have a natural place in leadership in the world. That gave me a mental and emotional confidence.
Linda Vester 

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Audre Lorde 

The show is like an Edwardian play - emotional life gets stepped on for the sake of accepted manners, and that's terrific for actors to play in.
Jason Alexander 

The spiritual quest was always the predominant aspect of my life. It's always been there. But there's also an incredible passion connected to it; it's not just a dry investigative process. I have been extremely emotional about it, and that comes out in the songs.
Cat Stevens 

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10

Perhaps the better word is emotional yes, I am an emotional man.
Gyorgy Ligeti 

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.
Jon Bon Jovi 

Playing a robot is possibly the most difficult role you can have as an actor, because you have to take all your innate emotional responses and completely suppress them. Even the way you walk is affected.
Kristanna Loken 

Quality afterschool programs provide safe, engaging and fun learning experiences to help children and youth develop their social, emotional, physical, cultural and academic skills.
Debbie Stabenow 

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.
Michael Shermer 

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair.
William Dunbar 

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.
Norman Mailer 

So basically, I think music at its best can be everything. It can be totally stupid and very intellectual and emotional at the same time. I don't think all those things shut each other out.
Ville Valo 

So we had life, death, illness, everything - every emotional involvement we had, we experienced. And I think that made what we had to do on stage, stronger. We got very much involved in what we were doing.
Tom Bosley 

So, without being cold, you really have to try to retain the capacity to help people without becoming too emotional or allowing your own emotions to have full rein.
Guy Green 

Some words having to do with the death of the people in the World Trade Center attack had been added, and when I got to it, I had this overwhelmingly emotional experience. I struggled to get through the words; tears were streaming down my cheeks.
Leonard Nimoy 

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
Albert Einstein 

That's me, I'm emotional.
David Wells 

The amount of work and the amount of both physical and emotional investment it takes to get to the top.
Drew Bledsoe 

The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response.
Daniel Goleman 

The ballet makes us look at those bodies, it makes us listen to that music, it makes us wonder at the geometry, of the way they come together. The way that extraordinary space is controlled and given such emotional force.
John Guare 

The best part of one's life is the working part, the creative part. Believe me, I love to succeed... However, the real spiritual and emotional excitement is in the doing.
Garson Kanin 

The British feel of blues has been hard, rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar, too little attention to words, far too little originality.
Alexis Korner 

The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.
Marsha Mason 

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.
Frank Zappa 

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9

It's the emotional trigger points that are important to me because I know if I could believe in the characters and try and imagine how they felt then I'd be able to do something quite honest.
Graeme Murphy 

It's typical of Italian culture that we only start to feel emotional about something when we have the possibility to see it in front of us. By February, Italy will have Olympic fever.
Alberto Tomba 

It's very dependent on your state of mind. And your emotional state as well. And a lot of it comes pouring out, you don't really have that much control with it.
Eric Clapton 

Jury selection is strictly an emotional process. They're looking for people they can manipulate. Both sides are.
Joseph Wambaugh 

Landscape is a piece that is emotional and psychological.
Jim Hodges 

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.
Todd Gitlin 

Lord of the Rings was just so much enjoyment. It was over about the space of a year that I was filming. It's one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done, so emotional.
Sean Bean 

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
Ayn Rand 

Make them laugh, make them cry, and hack to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that.
Mary Pickford 

Maybe its a case of one guitar feeling a certain way to the hands that makes one subsequently move differently over the strings, but my intent is always to wring the maximum emotional resonance out of the object in hand.
Gary Lucas 

Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.
Daniel Goleman 

Miss Rice talks very tough. We have gotten used to this nonsense. Miss Rice is a bit emotional about this, and we predicted that she would have a more emotional approach to this.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani 

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
Angela Carter 

Music for me is an emotional thing and it really does make me happy. It's not a tool for me to get fame or see my face in the papers or anything like that. It's about the fact that I really do enjoy it.
Ville Valo 

Music is a very personal and emotional form of communication.
Trevor Dunn 

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.
Nat King Cole 

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.
Malcolm Wilson 

Music is there to access those dark emotional corners that we don't normally get too close to.
Lesley Garrett 

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.
Maurice Ravel 

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
Brian Eno

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