I had a recurring fantasy in which I took (Rudy Giuliani) out during a press conference (it was nonlethal, just something that put him out of commission for a year or so), saving America from the horror of a President Giuliani. If that sounds like I had some trouble being 'objective,' I did.

After a decade of war you have this Pentagon-military apparatus run amok using resources that they shouldn't be to try to manipulate U.S. public opinion.

The guys on the ground are the guys I care about. I've had the most satisfaction telling their stories. But when you're in combat with somebody, yes, a bond does grow.

I want to be the greatest investigative reporter of my generation.

A state department official once told me this about the role of the president. He said: "We wage war for realist reasons, we justify wars for idealist reasons, and it's the president's job to balance the two." I agree.

Gore Vidal, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, talk about how the U.S. became a national security state after World War II. Essentially there's this bipartisan foreign policy elite who've been calling the shots for the last few decades and they're clearly still in control regardless of how clownish or absurd they demonstrate themselves to be. There's no shaking their orthodoxy. To me it was the most depressing thing, these full-scale military interventions firsthand for a number of years, seeing how quickly we can get involved in another war with very little debate.

A woman I loved [Andi Parhamovich] was killed in Baghdad in January 2007 – al-Qaeda in Iraq took credit for it … The memorial service with me crying over an empty coffin.