Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill author of the international bestseller Blackwater into the hidden world of Americas covert wars from Afghanistan to Yemen Somalia and beyond. With a strong cinematic style the film blurs the boundaries of documentary and fiction storytelling. Part action film and part detective story Dirty Wars is a gripping journey into one of the most important and underreported stories of our time. What begins as a report on a deadly U.S. night raid in a remote corner of Afghanistan quickly turns into a global investigation of the secretive and powerful Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). As Scahill digs deeper into the activities of JSOC he is pulled into a world of covert operations unknown to the public and carried out across the globe by men who do not exist on paper and will never appear before Congress. In military jargon JSOC teams find fix and finish their targets who are selected through a secret process. No ...
Review
"Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in faroff lands." Robert F Kennedy
Although it seems America may be pulling out of Afghanistan next year Special Operations units have been steadily and secretly increasing their military footprint around the rest of the world in places like Yemen and Somalia. Consequently today's wars are being fought in our name in foreign lands completely under the public radar. In light of recent revelations regarding the government's massive domestic surveillance program and the DOJ's record amount of prosecutions against whistleblowers one might reasonably argue that this is the least transparent administration in our nation's history. The Obama administration's attempts to sanitize war by shrouding it behind a cloak of government secrecy ultimately serve to keep American citizens in the dark about what is really going on. War is by nature dirty however and it is the very knowledge that war comes with huge costs and sacrifices that acts as a check on our aggressive impulses. By bringing the hidden truths about these military night raids and drone strikes into the light ȭirty Wars" makes a compelling argument about why you should care that we have been a nation at perpetual war since 911.
Originally the film was supposed to focus solely on the story of the buildup of JSOC itself but the filmmakers made a good decision to expand the scope of the documentary to include more about the man who helped to expose the story. Jeremy Scahill a sedulous investigative reporter for The Nation magazine is an interesting figure who stands apart in today's age of feckless news media and the increasingly moribund state of investigative journalism although it would have been interesting to learn more about what drives a man like Scahill to go into Taliban country with nothing more than a camera a notepad and a bulletproof vest.
After watching the film I thought of the late Roger Ebert's film review of a 2003 film about another intrepid investigative journalist Veronica Guerin who died while exposing a powerful syndicate of drug dealers in Dublin. In his review of the film Roger Ebert wrote rather disapprovingly ȭisturbed by the sight of gangs selling drugs to children and teenagers in the Dublin of the 1990s she began a highprofile even reckless campaign to expose them. Was she surprised when her campaign ended with her own murder She must have been or she would have gone about it differently. That she struck a great blow against the Irish drug traffic is without doubt but perhaps she could have done so and still survived to raise her son."
I don't know how Ebert would have felt about Scahill but there is a chilling scene in the movie where Jay Leno asks Scahill with surprising bluntness "How are you still alive" That we need people like Guerin and Scahill today is without question. But that our appreciation for their work is also balanced out of concern for their wellbeing is an even sadder reflection of the type of dangerous world we live in.
The most powerful aspect of the film is the way it humanizes the victims of American violence by giving us faces names and stories to connect with the dead. The term Ȭollateral damage" is a military euphemism for civilian casualties. In the newspapers that report on these Special Operations night raids and drone strikes which have been happening with increasing frequency the last few years we are only told the number of dead. Even worse we are told that all military age males who are killed in drone strikes whether they were intended targets or not are automatically categorized as militants. In a particularly stomach churning performance of spin doctoring a DoD spokesperson rationalizes the deaths of pregnant women and children by reassuring us that they COULD have been militants.
To those who respond "Well this is war. This is what happens in war" the film poses an important question What is the ultimate end goal of all this bloodshed What have we accomplished in our last 10 years at war if it has only engendered more enemies around the globe. In the film it would be comic if it weren't so tragic when a former intelligence officer states that what started out as a kill list of 50 names at the beginning of the war has grown into several thousands.
The film succeeds in presenting complex issues without moralizing and finds the right balance between veracity and entertainment. The movie does seem to stretch and play up material sometimes for false suspense and dramatic effect although I found the insight into the changing nature of warfare to be its most interesting and primary aspect. (This itself might not be news to people who read the news regularly thanks in large part to the work of journalists like Scahill.) But the film's greatest achievement is how it raises these important questions about who we are and where we are headed as a nation.
For a country in which more people die by motor vehicle accidents and gun violence every year than have ever died from terrorist attacks how did we come to a state of endless war Are we a nation that values human rights or not Are we a nation that values due process or condones assassination of our citizens Are we a nation that abides by the constitution or not And will Americans who speak out against these gross abuses of power become suspect in the eyes of their own government or are they doing what all citizens should be doing by actively engaging in our democratic process
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