His account of Peter Brook's influential version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is, however, an entertainingly defensive justification for his unfavorable review.
The "humanitarian intervention" in Libya, meanwhile, whatever civilians it may have begun by protecting, immediately killed other civilians with its bombs and immediately shifted from its defensive justification to attacking retreating troops and participating in a civil war.
He does spend some time in defensive self-justification, as when he tries to deflect any responsibility for the 1978 premiere of the newsmagazine "20/20," a bomb of still epic proportions.
Turnbull did not appear until well after midnight and his speech was brittle and defensive, full of justifications and explanations.
At the onset of the first war, he wrote the pamphlet Instructions for a Defensive Arms (1638), a justification of the people's right to self-defense.
The attack and kidnapping of a solder - and the killing of two others - is certainly a justification for defensive action; again, however, Israel's jus in bello was wildly disproportionate by any plausible measure.
"It looked very defensive, judgmental, full of self-justification," he said.
The BWC prohibits countries that have signed the treaty from developing, producing, stockpiling, acquiring, or retaining biological agents or toxins of types and in quantities that have no justification for protective, defensive, or other peaceful purposes.
"For many of them they know nothing about their religion and they're going there seeking adventure or under the false pretence that they're doing this for religion but they actually have very little knowledge about what their religion actually says about defensive jihad, and the actual religious justification for a group like Islamic State".
In his introduction here he writes, managing to sound both defensive and well pleased with himself: "A major justification for a new edition is to provide, for the first time, a commentary on the poems.
