Dirty Wars Quotes

“Three weeks after he climbed out the kitchen window, the boy was outdoors with his cousins—teenagers like him—laying a picnic for dinner beneath the stars. It was then he would have heard the drones approaching, followed by the whiz of the missiles. It was a direct hit. The boy and his cousins were blown to pieces. All that remained of the boy was the back of his head, his flowing hair still clinging to it. The boy had turned sixteen years old a few weeks earlier and now he had been killed by his own government. He was the third US citizen to be killed in operations authorized by the president in two weeks. The first was his father”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“The question all Americans must ask themselves lingers painfully: How does a war like this ever end?”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“But, from my experience in several undeclared war zones across the globe, it seems clear that the United States is helping to breed a new generation of enemies in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and throughout the Muslim world. Those whose loved ones were killed in drone strikes or cruise missile attacks or night raids will have a legitimate score to settle.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Obama, he added, “has routinized and normalized extrajudicial killing from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America’s temporary advantage in drone technology to wage a series of shadow wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Future US presidents—Republican or Democratic—will inherit a streamlined process for assassinating enemies of America, perceived or real. They will inherit an executive branch with sweeping powers, rationalized under the banner of national security.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Using drones, cruise missiles and Special Ops raids, the United States has embarked on a mission to kill its way to victory. The war on terror, launched under a Republican administration, was ultimately legitimized and expanded by a popular Democratic president.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“During his first term in office, the Washington Post concluded, “Obama has institutionalized the highly classified practice of targeted killing, transforming ad-hoc elements into a counterterrorism infrastructure capable of sustaining a seemingly permanent war.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“A considerable part of the CIA budget is now no longer spying. It’s supporting paramilitaries who work closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program.” The CIA, he added, “is a killing machine now.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“No modern US war would be complete without the involvement of Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Even though his company’s crimes and scandals were closely associated with the neoconservatives and the Bush era, Blackwater forces continued to play a significant role in the CIA’s global operations under the Obama administration.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“I think those people must be selected by being in the category of the worst. The more you are criminal, the more you are a drug abuser, the more you will be selected as member of the Somali parliament.” The government, he declared, existed “to cheat money.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Ninety-nine percent of the government are corrupted, immoral, dishonest people, selected by the international community,” Mohammed Farah Siad, a Mogadishu businessman, told me when I visited him at his home near the port of Mogadishu during the summer of 2011.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“IN THE SAME WAY that Afghanistan and Iraq provided a laboratory for training and developing a whole new generation of highly skilled, seasoned special operators, Yemen represented a paradigm that is sure to permeate US national security policy for decades to come. It was under the Bush administration that the United States declared the world a battlefield where any country would be fair game for targeted killings, but it was President Obama who put a bipartisan stamp on this worldview that will almost certainly endure well beyond his time in office.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Once I got stopped by AQAP guys at one of their checkpoints, and they saw I had a bottle of Johnnie Walker,” he recalled as he guzzled his second Heineken in ten minutes and lit a cigarette. “They asked me, ‘Why do you have that?’ I told them, ‘To drink it.’” He laughed heartily. “I told them to bother another guy and drove off.” The message of the story was clear: the al Qaeda guys don’t want trouble with tribal leaders.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“one incident in the Ansar al Sharia–held town of Jaar, residents said they were summoned to a gruesome event at which militants used a sword to chop off the hands of two young men accused of stealing electrical cables. The amputated hands were then paraded around the town as a warning to would-be thieves. One of the young men, a fifteen-year-old, reportedly died soon after from blood loss. In another incident, Ansar al Sharia in Jaar publicly beheaded two men it alleged had provided information to the United States to conduct drone strikes.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Although the ISI could not do much to strike back at the United States directly, it began a hunt to track down any Pakistanis it believed might have assisted the Americans in the bin Laden operation. Three weeks after the raid, intelligence agents arrested Dr. Shakil Afridi, the doctor who had helped the CIA run the fake Hepatitis B vaccination program in Abbottabad. He was locked up, tried and sentenced to thirty-three years in prison. Secretary of State Clinton and leading US lawmakers pushed for Afridi’s release.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Three MH-47 Chinooks took off from the same Jalalabad airfield once the Black Hawks had entered Pakistan. One set down on the Afghan side of the border with Pakistan. The other two flew to a remote riverbank in Kala Dhaka, located in the Swat region, roughly fifty miles north of bin Laden’s compound. There the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) would wait. In the event that the SEALs’ raid ran into serious trouble, the QRF could get to Abbottabad in approximately twenty minutes. Meanwhile, the Black Hawks whizzed quietly toward the compound and eventually made it to the outskirts of Abbottabad.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Eventually, the CIA enlisted a Pakistani doctor to administer a false Hepatitis B vaccination program in the neighborhood. The Agency wanted the doctor and his fake medical team to gain access to the compound and to extract DNA samples from the occupants so that they could compare them to samples the Agency already had from bin Laden’s deceased sister. The doctor involved in the effort, Shakil Afridi, was from Pakistan’s tribal regions. Eventually, the CIA would pay Afridi to run the fake program, which began in the poorer areas of Abbottabad in order to appear legitimate. In the end, the plan failed and Afridi and his team were unable to get any DNA samples. Afridi would later be arrested and imprisoned by Pakistani authorities for working with the CIA.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“As retired Pakistani Brigadier F. B. Ali observed, “The diyyat provision is much loved by the rich and powerful in Muslim societies where it is in force; it literally allows them to get away with murder.” In all, the families were paid a total of $2.3 million. On a visit to Cairo, Secretary of State Clinton praised the arrangement. “The families of the victims of the January 27th incident pardoned Mr. Davis, and we are very grateful for their decision,” she said. “We appreciate the actions that they took that enabled Mr. Davis to leave Pakistan and head back home.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Under the diyyat provision of Sharia law, the families of a victim could “pardon” the accused and in return accept a payment commonly referred to as “blood money.” That would result in the criminal case against Davis being dismissed. But it required the consent of the victims’ families.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“In any case, the United States and Pakistan began putting together a plot to use Islamic Sharia law to free Davis.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee a day after Kerry’s visit to Pakistan, Panetta called the CIA’s relationship to the ISI “one of the most complicated relationships that I’ve seen in a long time.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Unbeknownst to the Pakistani government, five months before Raymond Davis was taken into custody, US intelligence had made a discovery of potentially incalculable value. The CIA had located a courier linked to Osama bin Laden. They tracked his movements, which ultimately led them to a large house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Using satellite imagery, intelligence analysts noticed the movements of a mysterious figure inside the compound. The White House believed it had found bin Laden.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“The ISI had long dealt with the CIA, but JSOC was an entirely different beast, one the ISI would find terrifying.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“The mainstream Pakistani conspiracy theories on Davis suggested that the American operative was setting up false flag bombings to force the Pakistani government to take a more aggressive approach toward militant groups or to give the impression that the country’s nuclear weapons were not secure. No evidence was ever presented to support these allegations.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer said he heard credible reports from his colleagues who work on Pakistan that the two men were in fact ISI. “They were just going to pick him up and make a point, ‘We know who you are,’” Shaffer said. Because Davis had not been declared as CIA to the ISI, “they were gonna make the point to say, ‘We know you’re here.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“In Lahore, Raymond Davis lived and worked out of a US safe house in Upper Mall that he reportedly shared with five CIA security personnel. JSOC operatives also used the house. Far from being a diplomat, Davis worked on an ultrasecret, highly compartmentalized, classified team of men tasked with conducting sensitive surveillance and intelligence operations that could lead to targeted killing or capture.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“WikiLeaks released a series of classified cables showing that a month before Morrell denounced my report, the US Embassy was aware that US military Special Operations Forces had been conducting offensive operations inside Pakistan, helping direct US drone strikes and conducting joint operations with Pakistani forces against al Qaeda and Taliban forces in North and South Waziristan and elsewhere in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. According to an October 9, 2009, cable classified by US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson, the operations were “almost certainly [conducted] with the personal consent of [Pakistan’s] Chief of Army Staff General [Ashfaq Parvez] Kayani.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater worked with the Frontier Corps, saying, “There’s no real oversight. It’s not really on people’s radar screen.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“You’ve got BW guys that are assisting...and they’re all going to want to go on the jobs—so they’re going to go with them,” he said. “So, the things that you’re seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that—in some of those cases, you’re going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house.” Blackwater, he said, was paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

“Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, had a “pretty close relationship” with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. “They’ve met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another.” Working with Kestral, the former executive said, Blackwater provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.”
― Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield