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

“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

“The British version of 'Shit My Dad Says' is really entertaining.”
― 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, 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“After some time passed in the company of the mujahidin, I quickly acknowledged that success does not rely upon the job you undertake from nine to five, nor does it rely upon the wealth that you have accumulated, nor does it rely upon how far you have taken your studies in college. All of these things are respectable, but by being with the mujahidin, it helped open my eyes that our reason in life has nothing to do with any of these things,” Khan remembered. “The only thing in the entire world that matters to me, more than ever before, is the condition of my heart when I die.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“The mainstream Pakistani conspiracy theories on Davis suggested that the American operative was setting up false flag bombings to force the Pakistani government to take a more aggressive approach toward militant groups or to give the impression that the country’s nuclear weapons were not secure. No evidence was ever presented to support these allegations.”
― 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

“I am an individual convinced that Islam’s claim to power in the modern world is not going to be as easy as walking down a red carpet or driving through a green light. I am acutely aware that body parts have to be torn apart, skulls have to be crushed and blood has to be spilled in order for this to be a reality. Anyone who says otherwise is an individual who is not prepared to make sacrifices that heroes and champions make.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Unbeknownst to the Pakistani government, five months before Raymond Davis was taken into custody, US intelligence had made a discovery of potentially incalculable value. The CIA had located a courier linked to Osama bin Laden. They tracked his movements, which ultimately led them to a large house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Using satellite imagery, intelligence analysts noticed the movements of a mysterious figure inside the compound. The White House believed it had found bin Laden.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“One such American Muslim was a young imam from New Mexico named Anwar al Awlaki. “Yes, we disagree with a lot of issues when it comes to the foreign policy of the United States,” Awlaki said in 2001. “We are very conservative when it comes to family values. We are against the moral decay that we see in the society. But we also cherish a lot of the values that are in America. Freedom is one of them; the opportunity is another.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“The full details of what happened at the Mozang Chowk intersection that day may never be known. And who exactly Raymond Davis is and what he was doing in Lahore—or in Pakistan in general—is even murkier. Within moments of Davis’s vehicle coming to a stop, three people would be dead, the American would be on his way to a notorious Lahore jail, mobs of angry Pakistanis would be calling for his death and the most significant diplomatic crisis between the Pakistani and American governments since the 1979 burning and ransacking of the US Embassy in Islamabad would be in full swing.”
― 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

“Although the ISI could not do much to strike back at the United States directly, it began a hunt to track down any Pakistanis it believed might have assisted the Americans in the bin Laden operation. Three weeks after the raid, intelligence agents arrested Dr. Shakil Afridi, the doctor who had helped the CIA run the fake Hepatitis B vaccination program in Abbottabad. He was locked up, tried and sentenced to thirty-three years in prison. Secretary of State Clinton and leading US lawmakers pushed for Afridi’s release.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“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

“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

“But then, in early August, US intelligence tracked Mehsud down to his father-in-law’s house in a village called Zanghara in South Waziristan. On August 5, CIA drones fired at him as he reclined on the house’s rooftop with family members and other guests. Two Hellfire missiles ripped Mehsud in half, killing eleven other people at the house.”
― 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

“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

“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

“Ninety-nine percent of the government are corrupted, immoral, dishonest people, selected by the international community,” Mohammed Farah Siad, a Mogadishu businessman, told me when I visited him at his home near the port of Mogadishu during the summer of 2011.”
― 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

“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

“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

“According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the first strike in North Waziristan killed between seven and fifteen people, nearly all of them civilians. Many of the slain were from one family. One boy was reported to have survived, albeit with a skull fracture, a perforated stomach and the loss of an eye. The second strike in South Waziristan struck the “wrong house” and killed five to eight civilians, according to subsequent reports.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“If one stepped back from the various substories playing out on the ground in Iraq in 2005, the big-picture reality was that the country was quickly becoming the global epicenter of privatized warfare with scores of heavily armed groups of various loyalties and agendas roaming Iraq.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army