David Rieff Quotes

I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified as the same, and that's the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.

Al Qaeda doesn't abide by the Geneva Conventions, so in my opinion, they should not be afforded the protections of them.

Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses.

The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists.

You cannot be politically correct in a war.

To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.

When you start off with them being the bad guys and you being the good guys, once you've made that one decision, you don't have to think anymore, if you're in the military. From that point on, anything goes. From that point on, you're capable of anything, even atrocities. Because you've made a decision a long time ago that you're on the right side. You don't keep questioning, questioning, questioning

The willingness to condone some form of interrogational coercion, including outright torture in particular extreme circumstances is directly related … to the degree that one takes seriously the threat that terrorists pose to entire cities.

What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were there not innocent civilians there? We are simply taking the rules of engagement that you have invented and turning them back against you.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

In war there are no easy choices.

An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

We as Americans believe it's OK to kill people. We believe it's OK to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. We think it's OK to invade a country where we think Osama Bin Laden is and he's in the other country. So we just go in and we just kill. And we have the death penalty; we sanction it.

The troops are therefore empowered and are in duty bound in this war to use without mitigation even against women and children any means that will lead to success.

There is such a thing as legitimate warfare: war has its laws; there are things which may fairly be done, and things which may not be done.

They were targeting those people I referred to as 'little Eichmanns.' These were legitimate targets.

As in any war, there have been dreadful mistakes and civilian casualties. The difference is when Israelis kill innocents they apologize; when Hezbollah kills innocents they celebrate.

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

This war no longer has anything to do with knightly conduct or with the agreements of the Geneva Convention.

We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo - men, women and children. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

This book here, 'The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,' in it, I put together a case against George Bush that could result - it absolutely could result in his being prosecuted for first-degree murder in an American courtroom.

People should think of the war on terror as being like the war on crime--- a struggle in which success is measured not by final victory but by declines in incidence and seriousness of attacks.

The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis for our War on Terrorism.

When a soldier goes to war he has to have a moral justification for killing the other side.

The Taliban cut the heads of all the soldiers who were killed.