Anand Gopal Quotes
In 2012, I received a phone call from the family of Arsala Rahmani, the Afghan senator with whom I'd become friendly. That morning, a gunman had pulled up alongside Rahmani's vehicle, idling in a crowded intersection, and shot him point blank.
Gopal, Anand. No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes. Metropolitan Books, 2014.
Yitzhak Rabin was the extremely popular President of Israel. At the time of his assassination his party controlled the Knesset (Parliament) and he was moving to make a two state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli problem. An ultra Orthodox Jewish fanatic shot Rabin so what there would be no settlement that would give up Israeli control of Judea and Samaria—the Biblical lands that literal believers in the Bible know that God consecrated that land for the Jewish People. To make a settlement compromise was needed on both sides and Rabin was strong enough to persuade most of the Israelis to take that risk. His successors never had the trust and confidence of the Israeli people that Rabin had as he had led the Israeli armed forces to victory and had also proved that he was a brilliant politician on domestic affairs. The unity that Rabin was able to create among Israelis has never been duplicated by any Israeli politician since.
Pinkerton worked out a plan to spirit Lincoln through Baltimore where he had to change trains.
The motivations and willingness to die of the suicide bomber is not unique to Islamic terrorists. On occasion our CIA has used the technique. Official CIA instructions on “lost assassination” were distributed within the agency and sometimes to our “allies” who we were training.
Anand Gopal is a journalist and author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes, which describes the travails of three Afghans caught in the war on terror. It was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
