Daniel Byman Quotes


Before September 11, 2001, it was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist organization.


Context

On the terrorist group Hezbollah:


Citations

Daniel Byman, Political Scientist, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution, “Should Hezbollah Be Next?,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003

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Related Quotes

36 days later, September 11, he did strike. See {617467} for some of the specific contents. The memo was kept secret by the Bush administration until public pressure as a result of the 9-11 Commission hearings forced the declassification and release. At that point it became clear that there was no reason that the memo could not have been released much earlier except that it was embarrassing. See {637530} and {637533} for two other Bin Laden Warnings that Bush and his team ignored.


This quotation illustrates the dissentions that exist between the various Islamic terrorist organizations. The Secretary General of Hezbollah herein castigates the rival and more religiously fundamentalist Al Qaeda for killing innocent Muslims. Not only do neither mind killing innocent people who are not Muslims, but Hezbollah indiscriminately fires rockets into Israeli populated areas and has killed innocent Muslims, Christians and Jews. Further, Hezbollah will force Muslim citizens of Lebanon to store arms and allow rocked firing from their properties and institutions like schools, mosques, and hospitals, knowing perfectly well that they minute they do this, under the Geneva conventions, those homes or institutions become a legal target for retaliatory attacks, artillery, air strikes or ground forces and that innocent Muslim civilians would be killed. The levels of terrorist subtlety is difficult for Westerners to comprehend.


Bush claimed he did not remember the conversation. His incoming National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, was also briefed about bin Laden by the Clinton anti-terrorism director, Richard Clarke. The Bush Administration ignored the warnings until bin Laden struck on 9-11


He had continuously been accused of not going after the infamous terrorist who people were suspecting was hiding in Pakistan. The President had heard these reports but maintained that he did not know where bin Laden was. On this occasion he challenged his challenger.


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Daniel L. Byman is a professor and at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution where he conducts research on terrorism, Iran, and other Middle East security issues. Byman previously served as the vice dean of the School of Foreign Service's undergraduate program, the director of the Center for Security Studies and Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and as research director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation. He is also the lead course instructor for Georgetown's massive open online course on Terrorism and Counter Terrorism.