Now, here we are, and we have Obama in office, and he has drawn down forces in Iraq - which is a plan that was on Bush's desk the day that he left office. The forces in Afghanistan, he's going to draw down, too. But at the same time, Obama has also expanded a lot of the more unsavory, covert aspects of the wars, with the drone strikes and some of the night-raid missions.

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.

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.

If I were to read about me purely on Twitter, I wouldn’t know what to make of me.

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.

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.

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.