Drake Quotes

Many have speculated that this personal grudge may have been one of the motivating factors leading Bush to his disastrous Iraq War decisions.

O’Neil was one of the great ironies of the War on Terror. For years before 9-11 he had determined that al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden where major threats to America. However, the then Director of the FBI Louis Freeh had repeatedly told the White House and the national Security Council that they were not a major threat. O’Neil kept insisting that more attention be paid to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and was a very aggressive personality so much that his supervisors drove him out of the FBI. He then took the job of the Director of Security of the World Trade Center where he continued to warn about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. He was killed in the 9-11 attack when his predictions came true. The O’Neil case is yet another example of the people who were the most right in our intelligence apparatus were isolated or pushed out if they tried to command the attention of the nation’s policy makers.

He controlled a Shiite political party with its own armed militia.

Cunningham was part of an American Diplomatic Delegation negotiating with the Vietnamese. He had been an Naval Ace Fighter Pilot during the Vietnam War. He was notorious for his lack of tact.

For years of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Palestinians would never negotiate with Israel over anything. Finally that barrier was broken and, the PLO became a negotiating party with Israel. However, the terrorist organization Hamas, had challenged the PLO for political control of the Palestinians and then took over the Gaza strip—part of the Palestinian territory. They then shot thousands of rockets into Israel, a clear act of war under international law. The Israelis then attacked the Hamas infrastructure and any building of facility where they had command or communications, meetings, trainings or stored weapons or ammunitions. The Gazans suffered many more casualties than the Israelis—about 20 to 1 ratio. Many other countries tried to broker a ceasefire which the Israelis agreed to but Hamas would not. The Israeli ambassador was asked on American television if Israel would be willing to negotiate on the larger issues of the conflict as they had negotiated with the PLO. This was his reply. The major problem was that the Hamas Charter had two clauses that made negotiations impossible. Hamas was committed to the destruction of Israel and would not agree that the Israel had a right to exist. Second, the Hamas charter called for the killing of Jews anywhere in the world—men, women and children. The Israelis asked what they would negotiate about given those two charter items and the Hamas terror history in killing as many Israelis as they could.

A number of the American soldiers refused to obey Calley's illegal order. Some helped some villagers to escape, and a helicopter pilot landed betreen Callery's men and the villagers they were shooting at, and ordered his helicopter machine gun crew to fire on the soldiers if they did back off. The soldiers stopped firing at the civillians. However, his and other reports of the massacre were covered up by the military for a few years. Mai Lai was not the only major war crime perpetrated by Americans in the Vietnam War; there had been a few others. But given the years of fighting and the many opportunities war crimes violations under orders were quite rare. The Viet Cong had many more war crimes that they perpetrated, and our South Vietnamese allies repeatedly committed war crimes against their own people.