18 Quotes by Jeremy Scahill

I believe that one of the most important institutions in a democratic society is a free press.

If we’re going to kill our own people without even charging them with a crime, well, then we should just say we live in a different country, and stop telling the world that we’re the sort of great, shining city on the hill.

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

Hellfire missiles, the explosives fired from drones, are not always fired at people. In fact most drone strikes are aimed at phones. The SIM card provides a person’s location; when turned on, a phone can become a deadly proxy for the individual being hunted. When a night raid or drone strike successfully neutralizes a target’s phone, operators call that a “touchdown.

This body of reporting provides an unparalleled glimpse into the shadowy world of extrajudicial assassination that promises to be Barack Obama’s most troubling legacy.

Blackwater is a company whose business depends on war and conflict to thrive. It operates in a demand-based industry where corporate profits are intimately linked to an escalation of violence. That.

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

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.

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.