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 wasn’t like, boo hoo, Bin Laden’s dead, but I wasn’t jumping. America’s 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 they’re at the World Cup, like they won it… It’s sick that we turned it into a sporting event.

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 believe that we [Americans] are making more new enemies than we are killing terrorists at this point, and I think it's time that we stepped back from this aggressive assertion that we can just go to any country and conduct lethal operations.

The 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.

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 also think that we [Americans] are operating out of fear in our country. It's not that terrorism is not a threat, but it's not an existential threat. It is not the preeminent threat facing most Americans on any given day, and yet the power of nightmares is so strong.