I wasnโt like, boo hoo, Bin Ladenโs dead, but I wasnโt jumping. Americaโs a very nationalistic country, and in episodes like that of his death, it becomes jingoism. People are drinking, dancing in the street, chanting USA like theyโre at the World Cup, like they won itโฆ Itโs sick that we turned it into a sporting event.
Jeremy ScahillThe first week I was in Iraq, I said, "This is what I want to do. I want to be a reporter and to tell stories of people whose stories would not be told if we don't gather them." It's part of what I think of as the one-two punch of journalism. You're trying to give voice to the voiceless, and then you're also trying to hold those in power accountable, regardless of what party they're in.
Jeremy ScahillIf 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.
Jeremy ScahillEverywhere 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.
Jeremy ScahillYou can do as much diligence as possible before you go somewhere to try to protect yourself and the people around you.
Jeremy ScahillMy philosophy about journalism is simple - that we have a job to hold those in power accountable, to give voice to the voiceless, and to provide people with information that they can use to make informed decisions about what policies they want enacted in their name and what policies they don't.
Jeremy Scahill