If you're a human being, you'd have to be terrified. The impunity ... That these guys can sit on a TV show and just chat in a relaxed way about killing people like Julian Assange. They're joking, but at the same time, it's a vicious kind of rhetoric. The degree of enmity and the show of power and force against Assange must have terrified him. He was prepared to be paranoid when he was young - when nobody was actually after him. But this easy kind of vitriol and hatred that you now see as part of common discourse, it's become part and parcel of our everyday chatter.

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

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.

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

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.

Because I didn't see war in Iraq through the partisan lens that seems to dominate a lot of the perspective today with Fox News on the one side and MSNBC on the other, I didn't see it as Democrats good, Republicans bad. I saw it as a situation where the United States is a force that engages in these military operations around the world, and it's the job of journalists to provide the American people with information they can use to make informed decisions.

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.