Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

How could a preacher in rural Yemen pose a threat to the most powerful nation on earth? he wondered.

The Looming Tower.

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

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

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.

Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata. People get hung up that there's a targeted list of people, he said. It's really like we're targeting a cell phone. We're not going after people – we're going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.

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

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

When Obama took office, there had been only one U.S. drone strike in Yemen, in November 2002.6 By 2012 a drone strike was reported in Yemen every six days. As of August 2015, more than 490 people had been killed in drone strikes in Yemen alone.

That Obama would embrace rather than repudiate these Bush-Cheney "war on terror" principles became evident almost immediately after he was inaugurated. Within the first several weeks of his presidency, his top legal officials explicitly advocated several of the most extremist and controversial theories of power that defined the Bush administration's approach to terrorism.

special forces and drones replaced the type of large-scale ground invasion that destroyed Iraq. But the defining essence of the Bush-Cheney template—that the United States is fighting an endless war against terror suspects who have no due process rights of any kind—is very much alive and, in many cases, stronger than ever.