In an interview with journalist Glenn Greenwald and subsequent discussions with prominent news outlets, the Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple explores why Monday’s headline by Greenwald and colleague Jeremy Scahill felt comfortable using the term “assassination” as they described the manner in which the U.S. government targets and executes individuals it has accused of terrorists activity overseas.

The term the White House and Department of Justice have used to describe the controversial activity is “targeting killing,” and most major media outlets—including the Associated Press, New York Times, and the Washington Post itself—have taken the government’s lead on that choice of phrase.

Greenwald, however, disagrees and was adamant that the term “assassinate” is the both accurate and important.

“What we’re trying to do is use the accurate term rather than the euphemistic term that the government wants us to use,” Greenwald told Wemple, adding that “most media outlets wouldn’t do it.”

[Full disclosure, this writer used the word ‘murder’ on Monday, to describe the intentional killing by a government entity of an individual who has neither been accused in a court of law or presented with evidence attempting to show guilt.]

For Greenwald and Scahill, however, there was little debate that in the context of the drone program run by the Pentagon and CIA, with assistance from the NSA, that the appropriate word was ‘assassination.’

The spokesman at AP who spoke with Wemple told him no one at the news agency recalls “ever using the term ‘assassination’ as shorthand for the targeted killing program.”