Jeremy Scahill Quotes & Sayings

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. — Jeremy Scahill

The same grant programs that paid for local law enforcement agencies across the country to buy armored personnel carriers and drones have paid for Stingrays," said the ALCU's Soghoian. "Like drones, license plate readers, and biometric scanners, the Stingrays are yet another surveillance technology created by defense contractors for the military, and after years of use in war zones, it eventually trickles down to local and state agencies, paid for with DOJ and DHS money. — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

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 — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA, "enemy killed in action," even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless — Jeremy Scahill

What I believe in is being transparent and truthful and always trying to get the facts right. People will make their own judgment of whether or not they want to trust you based on how transparent you are with them and the principles that you bring to the game. — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

I also think that we [Americans] are operating out of fear in our country. It's not that terrorism is not a threat, but it's not an existential threat. It is not the preeminent threat facing most Americans on any given day, and yet the power of nightmares is so strong. — Jeremy Scahill

The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted in 2002, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes.3 Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the United States would conduct a lethal strike outside an "area of active hostilities" only if a target represents a "continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons," without providing any sense of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried.4 The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been Trust, but don't verify.5 — Jeremy Scahill

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

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

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. — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

Three weeks after he climbed out the kitchen window, the boy was outdoors with his cousins - teenagers like him - laying a picnic for dinner beneath the stars. It was then he would have heard the drones approaching, followed by the whiz of the missiles. It was a direct hit. The boy and his cousins were blown to pieces. All that remained of the boy was the back of his head, his flowing hair still clinging to it. The boy had turned sixteen years old a few weeks earlier and now he had been killed by his own government. He was the third US citizen to be killed in operations authorized by the president in two weeks. The first was his father — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

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

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. — Jeremy Scahill

The notion that critics of the drone program are being manipulated by propaganda from terrorist organizations "would be laughable, were it not so offensive towards civilian victims of drone strikes." A — Jeremy Scahill

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

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

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 — Jeremy Scahill

I would like to think that what we were doing was in some way trying to help Afghans," the source explained, but the notion "that what we were part of was actually defending the homeland or in any way to the benefit of the American public" had evaporated long ago. "There's no illusion of that that exists in Afghanistan. It hasn't existed for many years. — Jeremy Scahill

For much of my life as a journalist, I've viewed myself as being embedded with civilians and with those people who live on the other side of the barrel of a gun. — Jeremy Scahill

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

Obama was particularly offended, as he put it, that "the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans without judicial approval." Justifying — Jeremy Scahill

The Looming Tower. — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

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. — Jeremy Scahill

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

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. — Jeremy Scahill

Remember that there was great controversy that George Bush asserted the power simply to detain American citizens without due process or simply to eavesdrop on their conversation without warrant. Here you have something much more severe. Not eavesdropping on American citizens, not detaining them without due process, but killing them without due process. And yet many Democrats and progressives, because it's President Obama doing it, have no problem with it and are even in favor of it." Greenwald added: "To say that the President has the right to kill citizens without due process is really to take the Constitution and to tear it into as many little pieces as you can and then burn it and step on it." For — Jeremy Scahill