John Yoo Quotes

Our enemy now is a stateless network of religious extremists. They do not obey the laws of war, they hide among peaceful populations and launch surprise attacks on civilians. They have no armed forces per se, no territory or citizens to defend and no fear of dying during their attacks.

Al Qaeda operates by launching surprise attacks on civilian targets with the goal of massive casualties. Our only means for preventing future attacks, which could use WMDs, is by acquiring information that allows for pre-emptive action.

The United States is at war with the al Qaeda terrorist group. Al Qaeda is not a nation-state and it has not signed the Geneva Conventions. It shows no desire to obey the laws of war; if anything it directly violates them by disguising themselves as civilians and attacking purely civilian targets to cause massive casualties.

Al Qaeda is not a nation-state and it has not signed the Geneva Conventions. It shows no desire to obey the laws of war; if anything it directly violates them by disguising themselves as civilians and attacking purely civilian targets to cause massive casualties.

If I have to reduce all of the laws of war into a single sentence, it is this. You divide the world into two, combatants and noncombatants. You can attack deliberately combatants, but not deliberately noncombatants. Israel acts that way. It attacks combatants and accidentally kills noncombatants. But in the case of the terrorists, it's the exact opposite. They deliberately attack combatants - noncombatants, civilians, deliberately.

A colonial war is a very dirty kind of war. You're not fighting armed forces. You're fighting mostly unarmed people. And to fight that kind of war requires professional killers, which means mercenaries.

But clearly, this is what this is about. It's about pushing the security bubble out. It's about rooting out every last guy, so that there's not even somebody who can fire a single, solitary RPG round from some little qalat out here.

The battle against terrorism is not only a military fight but primarily a battle of information.

Today, we have a powerful military that serves as a deterrent, but the enemy we have today is not like World War II, where you sign a piece of paper and the war is over. Today they're not in uniform. In my time we knew what the enemy looked like, we knew his weapons systems and such. Today, your cab driver may be the person, you have no idea. I don't know how we got into this fix, but we're there.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

It's not religious war, but Al-Qaeda always use religions, Islam - actually, as a pretext and as a cover and as a mantle for their war and for their terrorism and for their killing and beheading and so on.

The war against terror is like a war against dandruff. It's a metaphor. It's not about anything.

There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.

The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror.

Since war itself is the most extreme form of terrorism, a war on terrorism is profoundly self-contradictory.

You can't make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It's a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done.

You cannot win a War on Terrorism. It's like having a war on jealousy.

How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?

War on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement operation.

I've never heard of soft war.There's no soft war. War is war. Any war is ruthless. When you fight terrorists, you fight them like any other war.

There are very interesting books about these events, for instance one by a very well-known American historian named William R. Polk called Violent Politics. It's a record of what are basically guerrilla wars from the American Revolution right up through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don't think we're at war with Islam. I don't think we're at war with all Muslims. I think we're at war with jihadists.

We have determined enemies who will use any means available to take the lives of as many Americans as possible. They cheered when the Twin Towers fell. They dream of even larger calamities. They must be stopped. And that requires an intelligence system that finds them, before they harm us.

What I do know is that Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have been converted into the closest thing the West has to religious-like martyrs in the war against radical Islam, which means that anything short of pure reverence for them generates tribal rage and vilification.