Jeremy Scahill Quotes

My fear, as an American, is that our own actions are going to contribute to an inspiration for terrorists to want to harm us or kill us.

According to a former drone operator for the military's Joint Special Operations Command, the National Security Agency often identifies targets for drone strikes based on controversial metadata analysis and cell phone tracking technologies - an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. Rather than confirming a target's identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.

I have chosen to cast my lot with independent media outlets because I believe that only through independent reporting where you are not beholding to the interests of corporations or government are you able to really aggressively pursue the truth.

I believe that we [Americans] are making more new enemies than we are killing terrorists at this point, and I think it's time that we stepped back from this aggressive assertion that we can just go to any country and conduct lethal operations.

Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism - of the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously - than they are of the crime itself.

Obama once reportedly told his aides, [It] turns out I'm really good at killing people.

When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath - not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there's this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you're asked to participate in.

I wasn't like, boo hoo, Bin Laden's dead, but I wasn't jumping. America's a very nationalistic country, and in episodes like that of his death, it becomes jingoism. People are drinking, dancing in the street, chanting USA like they're at the World Cup, like they won it ... It's sick that we turned it into a sporting event.

They describe SIGINT capabilities on these unconventional battlefields as "poor" and "limited." Yet such collection, much of it provided by foreign partners, accounted for more than half the intelligence used to track potential kills in Yemen and Somalia. The ISR study characterized these failings as a technical hindrance to efficient operations, omitting the fact that faulty intelligence has led to the killing of innocent people, including U.S. citizens, in drone strikes.12

My philosophy about journalism is simple - that we have a job to hold those in power accountable, to give voice to the voiceless, and to provide people with information that they can use to make informed decisions about what policies they want enacted in their name and what policies they don't.

If I were to read about me purely on Twitter, I wouldn't know what to make of me.

Operations] that previously only Tier One Special Mission Units would be doing.

The British version of 'Shit My Dad Says' is really entertaining.

I don't pretend to be objective. There is no such thing as being an objective journalist.

Blackwater had won $1 billion in "diplomatic security" contracts through the State Department alone.81

Everywhere you go, people have recorded or captured events in real time on their mobile phones. It becomes one of the first questions you ask when you go in to investigate something.

You can do as much diligence as possible before you go somewhere to try to protect yourself and the people around you.

Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word assassination.

I think we [Americans] are going to look back and realize that the civil liberties that we've given up in the name of security, the authority that we've given Democratic and Republican presidents, all have contributed to a fraying of the fabric of our democratic republic.