The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program QUOTES

1 " The same grant programs that paid for local law enforcement agencies across the country to buy armored personnel carriers and drones have paid for Stingrays," said the ALCU's Soghoian. "Like drones, license plate readers, and biometric scanners, the Stingrays are yet another surveillance technology created by defense contractors for the military, and after years of use in war zones, it eventually trickles down to local and state agencies, paid for with DOJ and DHS money. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

2 " Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata. "People get hung up that there's a targeted list of people," he said. "It's really like we're targeting a cell phone. We're not going after people – we're going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

3 " Hellfire missiles, the explosives fired from drones, are not always fired at people. In fact most drone strikes are aimed at phones. The SIM card provides a person’s location; when turned on, a phone can become a deadly proxy for the individual being hunted. When a night raid or drone strike successfully neutralizes a target’s phone, operators call that a “touchdown. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

4 " When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath—not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there’s this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you’re asked to participate in. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

5 " Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is assassination. While every president since Gerald Ford has upheld an executive order banning assassinations by U.S. personnel, Congress has avoided legislating the issue or even defining the word “assassination. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

6 " Obama once reportedly told his aides, “[It] turns out I’m really good at killing people. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

7 " This body of reporting provides an unparalleled glimpse into the shadowy world of extrajudicial assassination that promises to be Barack Obama’s most troubling legacy. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

8 " Our politicians are more fearful of the politics of terrorism—of the charge that they do not take terrorism seriously—than they are of the crime itself. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

9 " According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, the National Security Agency often identifies targets for drone strikes based on controversial metadata analysis and cell phone tracking technologies—an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

10 " The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted in 2002, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes.3 Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the United States would conduct a lethal strike outside an “area of active hostilities” only if a target represents a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” without providing any sense of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried.4 The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been Trust, but don’t verify.5 "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

11 " the notion that critics of the drone program are being manipulated by propaganda from terrorist organizations “would be laughable, were it not so offensive towards civilian victims of drone strikes.” A "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

12 " I would like to think that what we were doing was in some way trying to help Afghans,” the source explained, but the notion “that what we were part of was actually defending the homeland or in any way to the benefit of the American public” had evaporated long ago. “There’s no illusion of that that exists in Afghanistan. It hasn’t existed for many years. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

13 " They describe SIGINT capabilities on these unconventional battlefields as “poor” and “limited.” Yet such collection, much of it provided by foreign partners, accounted for more than half the intelligence used to track potential kills in Yemen and Somalia. The ISR study characterized these failings as a technical hindrance to efficient operations, omitting the fact that faulty intelligence has led to the killing of innocent people, including U.S. citizens, in drone strikes.12 "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

14 " The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA, “enemy killed in action,” even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

15 " Obama was particularly offended, as he put it, that “the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans without judicial approval.” Justifying "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

16 " When Obama took office, there had been only one U.S. drone strike in Yemen, in November 2002.6 By 2012 a drone strike was reported in Yemen every six days. As of August 2015, more than 490 people had been killed in drone strikes in Yemen alone. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

17 " That Obama would embrace rather than repudiate these Bush-Cheney “war on terror” principles became evident almost immediately after he was inaugurated. Within the first several weeks of his presidency, his top legal officials explicitly advocated several of the most extremist and controversial theories of power that defined the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

18 " Although government officials have repeatedly said there is a rigorous process for making sure no one is unfairly placed in the databases, the guidelines acknowledge that all nominations of “known terrorists” are considered justified unless the National Counterterrorism Center has evidence to the contrary. In an April 2014 court filing, the government disclosed that there were 468,749 KST nominations in 2013, of which only 4,915 were rejected—a rate of about 1 percent.10 The rules appear to invert the legal principle of due process, defining nominations as “presumptively valid. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

19 " special forces and drones replaced the type of large-scale ground invasion that destroyed Iraq. But the defining essence of the Bush-Cheney template—that the United States is fighting an endless war against terror suspects who have no due process rights of any kind—is very much alive and, in many cases, stronger than ever. "

― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program