Jeremy Scahill > Quotes

“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 Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

“The British version of 'Shit My Dad Says' is really entertaining.”
― 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, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

“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, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“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, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

“Obama once reportedly told his aides, “[It] turns out I’m really good at killing people.”
― Jeremy Scahill, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

“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, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

“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, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

“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, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

“PAKISTAN AND THE CIA have a long and complicated history, but particularly in the years after 9/11, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had come to accept that it would have to live with the Agency’s operatives running around its territory. At times, the two entities would cooperate, but more often the CIA found itself scrambling to thwart ISI attempts to stymie its operations, while the ISI tried to keep track of all the operatives the United States had working in Pakistan. It was a mutually agreed-upon relationship based on mistrust, dishonesty, backstabbing and, in the end, necessity.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Blackwater had won $1 billion in “diplomatic security” contracts through the State Department alone.81”
― Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

“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, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

“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.”
― Jeremy Scahill, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

“Shakespeare was the worst thing I read during my entire stay in prison. I never liked him to start with. Probably the only reason he became so famous is because he was English and had the backing and promotion of the speakers of a global language.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“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, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

“Any intelligence person of stature would tell you that you don’t give raw intelligence to the laymen, because they don’t know how to read it,”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Hunter attributed JSOC’s rise to prominence as the lead antiterrorism force after 9/11 to a belief within the Bush administration and the Special Ops community that the CIA was not up to the task of waging a global war.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“During his year in Iraq, Paul Bremer presided over various U.S. policies that greatly accelerated the emergence of multiple antioccupation resistance movements. In April 2004, it all came to a head.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

“When we saw these people coming back in town, all of us who were around in those days said, ‘Oh my God, the crazies are back’—‘the crazies’—that’s how we referred to these people,” recalled Ray McGovern, who served for twenty-seven years at the CIA and was a national security briefer to George H. W. Bush when he was vice president and served under him when he was the director of the Agency in the late 1970s.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“How could a preacher in rural Yemen pose a threat to the most powerful nation on earth? he wondered.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“The mindset, he said, was, “The world is a battlefield and we are at war. Therefore the military can go wherever they please and do whatever it is that they want to do, in order to achieve the national security objectives of whichever administration happens to be in power.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“In November, Pakistani forces picked up al Qaeda trainer Ibn al Shaykh Libi, who allegedly ran the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan where the would-be “Shoe Bomber,” Richard Reid, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called Twentieth Hijacker, were both trained. The Pakistanis handed Libi over to FBI agents stationed at Bagram Air Base for questioning.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Under a secret presidential directive issued by President Clinton, JSOC was authorized to operate on US soil in counterterror operations and to confront any WMD threats, circumventing the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from conducting law enforcement domestically.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Wolfowitz and Libby were the key authors of Cheney’s defense manifesto, which argued that the United States must be the sole superpower and take all necessary actions to deter “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“As the World Trade Center towers crumbled to the ground, so too did the system of oversight and review of lethal covert ops that had been carefully constructed over the course of the previous decade. “ONLY A CRISIS—actual or perceived—produces real change.” So wrote the conservative icon Milton Friedman in his book Capitalism and Freedom.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Despite this, Qanyare’s faith in his CIA partners was unshaken. “America knows war. They are war masters. They know better than me. So when they fight a war, they know how to fund it. They know very well. They are teachers, great teachers.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“IN EARLY 2005, a behind-the-scenes scuffle broke out between the CIA, CENTCOM and the Pentagon over who should take the lead in targeting al Qaeda in Pakistan after some US intelligence reports suggested that al Qaeda’s number-two man, Ayman al Zawahiri, was believed to be attending a meeting in the tribal area of Bajaur in Waziristan.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“According to US officials, “about two dozen suspected Qaeda fighters” were killed in “a planned attack against militants who had been conducting attacks against an American forward operating base across the border in Afghanistan.” But according to local villagers, the SEALs opened fire, killing Payo Jan Wazir, the home’s owner, along with six children, including a three-year-old girl, a two-year-old boy and two women. When Payo Jan’s neighbors heard the gunfire and ran out to see what was happening, villagers said, the SEALs opened fire on them, killing ten more people.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“operations] that previously only Tier One Special Mission Units would be doing.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“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, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield