Anti War Activists

"I just want to ask a question: Who really cares? To save a world in despair There'll come a time, when the world won't be singin' Flowers won't grow, bells won't be ringin' Who really cares? Who's willing to try to save a world That's destined to die?"

"Hey baby, what'cha know good? I'm just gettin' back, but you knew I would. War is hell, when will it end? When will people start gettin' together again?"

"Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong Oh, but who are they to judge us Simply because our hair is long Oh, you know we've got to find a way To bring some understanding here today."

"Picket lines and picket signs Don't punish me with brutality Talk to me, so you can see Oh, what's going on What's going on."

"Father, father We don't need to escalate. You see, war is not the answer For only love can conquer hate. You know we've got to find a way To bring some lovin' here today."

"Mother, mother There's too many of you crying. Brother, brother, brother There's far too many of you dying. You know we've got to find a way To bring some lovin' here today."

"By the look in your eye I can tell you're gonna cry. Is it over me? If it is, save your tears For I'm not worth it, you see. For I'm the type of boy who is always on the roam, Wherever I lay my hat that's my home, I'm telling you that's my home."

"You are my pride and joy And I just love you, little darlin' Like a baby boy loves his toy You've got kisses sweeter than honey And I work every day to give you all I know And that's why you're my pride and joy."

"Oh, I've got news for you Baby, that I've made plans for two I guess I'm just a stubborn kind of fellow Got my mind made up to love you."

"I think we're destroying higher education by making it high-tech rather than high-humanity. What we need to do is realize that we now have the capacity to produce more than we need with fewer and fewer people working at it. We need to spend more time on the humanitarian side of how we live together in peace, how we learn to love each other, how we benefit from studying different cultures and different histories, and enriching ourselves as individuals that way, rather than just pressing for money and fame... It's a dead-end road that will destroy us. We don't need all those jobs, you know. We need to build a public throughout the world that has a better understanding of fundamental values, and history, and culture, and not in high-tech manufacturing of unnecessary necessities."

"He (Saddam) had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt."

"There can't be any more Fallujahs. Fallujah is the 21st century equivalent of Guernica. We just went in and destroyed that city, drove the people out, killed them, thousands. We don't know how many."

"The world is the most dangerous place it's ever been now because of what our country has done, and is doing, and we have to take it back."

"Abu Ghraib is unbelievable in the innocent times of 1961, that we would torture people that way, and on the instructions of the president of the United States and his highest legal advisers. “Torture is OK,” they said. “Go for it, fellas.” If we can’t renounce that and remove it from office, then the Constitution doesn’t work anymore... We’ve got to do more than take back the Constitution. There has to be accountability for what’s happened. The Constitution says that the president, vice president and other officials of the United States shall be removed from office upon impeachment for and conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors.... If you care about the Constitution, you better start talking to your member of the House of Representatives and say impeachment now is essential to the integrity of the United States government and to the future of the United States. We’ve had more than 500,000 people sign on “Vote to Impeach.” We need to get 5 million, and we need to get 5 million on there quick. And then the Congress will react."

"You know, the Nuremberg Tribunal called the war of aggression the supreme international crime, and it is. And George W. Bush has waged a war of aggression against Iraq. He’s killed more than 100,000 people. Are their lives worth nothing? Can we have a moment of silence in memory of all the people who have died in Iraq because of the criminal acts of George W. Bush in waging this war of aggression? Every moment of their lives is fraught with danger right now because of us. The world is the most dangerous place it’s ever been now because of what our country has done, and is doing, and we have to take it back. We can’t wait four more years. There can’t be any more Fallujahs. Fallujah is the 21st century equivalent of Guernica. We just went in and destroyed that city, drove the people out, killed them, thousands. We don’t know how many. They won’t even bother to count who’s been killed or how many, or estimate how many. They just keep killing. Almost every day we’re reading about another checkpoint where some family got wiped out because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do, according to the military there."

"American aggression had already created incalculable levels of “misery for the world”; that “the poor of the planet made poorer, dominated and exploited by the foreign policies of the U.S. and its rich allies;” that “the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, an offense called ‘the supreme international crime’ in the Nuremberg Judgment."

"What is to be said of leaders with the mental acuity and moral perceptions revealed by these disclosed words and deeds? They are at best enemies of life without understanding. Psychologically, they disconnect all feeling for the beauty of the planet — a rose, an impala in motion, a baby’s hand, a Confucian analect, a Bach cantata, a parable of Jesus, pilgrims bathing in the Ganges, a crowd watching a soccer game in Rio, the subway in Moscow, the skyline in Manhattan. They cannot think or feel about the human meaning of what they do.,, A single Trident II submarine can inflict more death than all prior wars in history. Twenty-four missiles, launched while submerged, each with seventeen independently targeted, maneuverable nuclear warheads five times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, can travel 5,000 nautical miles to strike within 300 feet of 408 predetermined targets. Nuclear winter might follow even if no other weapons are used. No nation or individual can be permitted to possess the power to destroy the world. An imperative need is for an informed and active public struggling for its right to survive. Public ignorance and apathy is “as much a concern for survival of the species as the unthinkable power to destroy the world wielded by a few men in a mindless manner”"

"The consistent underlying psychology of the United States, which has held the lead in nuclear war capability and capacity throughout these 40 [now 75] years, should be understandable to anyone who has ever known a violent neighborhood bully. The government of Americans means to have its way through the use and threatened to use of superior force. It will lie. It will deceive. It will kill. It will escalate the threat and use of force to the highest level it dares. It will bluff, dangerous as that can be. It will do whatever is must to dominate. It does this in the face of the fact that its very preparation for a nuclear war may destroy all life. American war planners busily devised strategies for crippling the Soviet Union with revealing names like BROILER, FROLIC, SIZZLE, SHAKEDOWN, DROPSHOT, and VULTURE. The number of Soviet targets to be destroyed grew in number from 20 cities in December 1945 to 200 cities in 1949 and to 3261 total targets by 1957. The number of times the use of nuclear weapons has been contemplated by Americans is unbearable."

"A great many people in this country are worried about law-and-order. And a great many people are worried about justice. But one thing is certain: You cannot have either until you have both."

"There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals."

"The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say."

"A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you."

"It is likely that well before Clark took his bizarre positions in support of highly repressive, violent, and intolerant political systems and their leaders, he came to the conclusion that the United States was the most dangerous and reprehensible source of evil in the world. This overarching belief led to the reflexive sympathy and support for all the enemies and alleged victims of the United States. They include dictators of different ideological persuasion noted above, whose inhumane qualities and policies Clark was unable to discern or acknowledge, let alone condemn. It was sufficient for Clark's moral accounting that if these dictators were opposed to (and allegedly victimized by) the United States, they deserved and earned his sympathy.""

"Mr. Clark often told voters what they did not want to hear. He advocated gun control legislation in speeches to hunters and told defense industry workers that their plants should be closed... Mr. Clark was the author or co-author of several books, including “The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf” (1992) and “The Torturer in the Mirror” (2010)... He was also one of the most quotable public figures of his generation, many of his pronouncements tending toward aphoris.."

"Ramsey Clark, who championed civil rights and liberties as attorney general in the Johnson administration, then devoted much of the rest of his life to defending unpopular causes... died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93... Mr. Clark... shunned a government limousine in favor of his own beat-up Oldsmobile, set an ambitiously liberal course as attorney general.. He filed the first lawsuit to force a school district — Dale County, Ala. — to desegregate or else lose its federal school aid. He went on to file the first voting rights and school desegregation suits in the North.... He oversaw the drafting of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968 — better known as the Fair Housing Act — which addressed housing discrimination... Mr. Clark went into private legal practice and soon devoted more and more of his time to representing the disadvantaged and the unpopular, including Alaskan Natives, war resisters, rioters at the Attica prison in New York State and Lyndon LaRouche... In 1972...Mr. Clark... publicly criticized American conduct of the [Vietnam] war. ... In 2011, he condemned NATO’s bombing campaign against Qaddafi’s government. In 2013, he said Iran had no intention of building a nuclear bomb and denounced sanctions against that country. Later, he protested lethal attacks by unmanned American drone aircraft on other nations... In 2008, the United Nations General Assembly awarded Mr. Clark its Prize in the Field of Human Rights, which it gives every five years to human rights defenders."

"The test of an intelligence officer is not so much the ability to accumulate information; it's to judge between different pieces of information, and not to take a piece of information and use it in a piece of analysis simply because it fits your case, but to use it because it either comes from a reliable source like signals intercepts, from a human source that has been vetted over time as a reliable person, or it comes from documentary information -- papers you've stolen from another government or some other organization. The work that came out of Feith's shop that I saw, especially on Al Qaeda and Iraq, was simply ... finding pieces of information in the world of intelligence information that fit the argument they wanted to make. Tenet, to his credit, had us go back 10 years in the agency's records and look and see what we knew about Iraq and Al Qaeda. I was available at the time, and I led the effort. We went back 10 years. We examined about 20,000 documents, probably something along the line of 75,000 pages of information, and there was no connection between [Al Qaeda] and Saddam."

"I happened to do the research on the links between al Qaeda and Iraq. (MATTHEWS: And what did you come up with?) SCHEUER: Nothing."

"The Afghan jihad confronted the theoreticians of democratic Islam with a hard reality. The Red Army was not defeated by a democratic revolution, but by an Islamist revolution grounded, guided, and steeled by God's words as found in the Koran and explained by the Prophet. Driven by their faith, the mujhadein [sic] uses bullets, not votes, to win one for Allah, and by so doing revalidated jihad as Islam's normative response to attack."

"You know, I was born at night but not last night, sir. There is no operation at the CIA that is conducted without approval of lawyers. It is the bane of our existence, and it is a detriment to the defense of America, but, nonetheless, that is the fact."

"His motive—his motive is to change our policies, sir. Notwithstanding what the president or Mr. Kerry said during the campaign, he really doesn't give a darn about our democracy or our society. He is after a change in policies which he views as lethal to Muslims."

"I don't consider Osama Bin Laden to be a terrorist. I consider him to be a resistance fighter."

"[Bin Laden has] already said publicly that you can have all the oil you want. I can‘t drink it. We‘re going to sell it to you at a marketplace."

"I think the 9/11 Commission, report, for example is wrong. The 9/11 Commission report identifies bin Laden and his followers as takfiris, who kill Muslims if they don‘t agree with them. They‘re not takfiris. They‘re just very devout, severe Salafists and Wahhabis."

"I think that – you know – we just encountered – America encountered – a brilliant man, and in terms of being a noble cause, it wasn't that many centuries ago that killing in the name of God, or waging war in the name of God, was a major thing in Christianity."

"It's always been hard for me to understand how we say people who supports Osama Bin Laden or someone else like him – who are willing to give their lives to destroy the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia – how we can describe those people as people who hated freedom. It seems to me that their definition of freedom might be different than ours, but to oppose a dictatorship, one must want freedom in some kind of way."

"Bin Laden's long-standing support for the Palestinians against Israel also appears to have been learned at his father's knee."

"He (Osama bin Laden) doesn't want to fight this war forever. A lot of people mistake him as someone who can't get along without fighting. But that's not clearly the case."

"Musharraf has bent over backwards, sir. Quite frankly, I would have bet my pension that Musharraf would not have done half of what he's done. He's done a tremendous amount for us."

"Right now, the choice isn't between war and peace. It is between war and endless war."

"I wasn't in the room with the president and Mr. Tenet. But I can tell that you that the people who were working against Osama bin Laden were assured from the first day that much of the work we had done in the last decade would be undone by that war."

"Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries."

"I hope that Israel flourishes, I just don't think that Israel is worth ‘an American life or an American dollar’"

"We know for certain that bin Laden was seeking CBRN [chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear] weapons . . . and that Iraq and Sudan have been cooperating with bin Laden on CBRN weapon acquisition and development."

"Regarding Iraq, bin Laden, as noted, was in contact with Baghdad's intelligence service since at least 1994. He reportedly cooperated with it in the area of chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear [CBRN] weapons and may have trained some fighters in Iraq at camps run by Saddam's anti-Iran force, the Mujahedin al-Khalq."

"In Sudan, Bin Laden decided to acquire and, when possible, use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons against Islam's enemies. Bin Laden's first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with NIF [Sudan's National Islamic Front], Iraq's intelligence service and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad with its intelligence officers in Sudan and by a [Hassan] Turabi-brokered June-1994 visit by Iraq's then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan's Corriere della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for "nurturing Iraq's ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors. Turabi had plans to formulate a "common strategy" with bin Laden and Iraq for subverting pro-U.S. Arab regimes, but the meeting was a get-acquainted session where Hijazi and bin Laden developed a good rapport that would "flourish" in the late 1990s."

"There is information showing that in the 1993-1994 period bin Laden began to work with Sudan and Iraq to acquire a CBRN capability for al Qaeda."

"The data in the public domain suggest the truth about bin Laden's activities in Afghanistan is much closer to the picture of him as 'the great freedom fighter of the Islamic world" than to the Western experts' description of him as an Islamic do-gooder or an immature, irrational youth."

"Before the [1990 Iraqi] attack [on Kuwait], bin Laden angered Saudi authorities by making a public "prophesy ... [that] Saddam was going to invade Saudi Arabia." Sa'd al-Faqih claims bin Laden also sent "secret confidential letters to the King" about the Iraqi threat; according to al-Faqih, "he [bin Laden] was giving talks about it in the mosques. He was giving speeches in the mosques and talking about the dangers of the Ba'ath ... having ambitions to invade Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And then his prophesy was correct. And he was never respected or rewarded for that. Instead he was advised to stay in Jeddah; he was put in sort of house arrest."

""Bin Laden, of course, learned his military skills in Afghanistan, not on the Iran-Iraq border, and, as a result, his methodological approach to waging jihad is marked by a measured manner stressing patience, preparation, and professionalism."

"In 1993 Osama bin Laden began speaking in detail to Muslim and Western journalists about his beliefs, goals, and intentions, and began publishing commentaries on these matters in the media.... While bin Laden's words have not been a torrent, they are plentiful, carefully chosen, plainly spoken, and precise. He has set out the Muslim world's problems as he sees them; determined that they are caused by the United States; explained why they must be remedied; and outlined how he will try to do so. Seldom in America's history has an enemy laid out so clearly the basis for the war he is waging against it."