I watched this 83 minute DVD "Dirty Wars" last night and thought it was very good.
Before "Dirty Wars", Jeremy Scahill came into the media spotlight for exposing the extent of the use of private Blackwater operations in Iraq. He mentions how he found the media talkshow following his reporting on Blackwater to be more like a boxing match than a revealing of the truth.
In "Dirty Wars", he visits a small Afghan village outside the relatively safe "green zone", to try and do some "real journalism" rather than remaining as an embedded journalist and passing on the stories handed-out to embedded journalists by the military.
In the village, he talks to an Afghan family who were attacked by US special forces (JSOC), killing one man and three women. The family had video footage of their domestic life the night of the attack, where they had been having a late night celebrating something and doing traditional dancing. Then later that night when they heard a disturbance, the man who had been dancing went out the door to see what it was and was shot.
Scahill's documentary footage humanizes the populations that are being attacked, showing that they are real human families and not just statistics of collateral damage.
One of his themes is how the war on terror is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You might start with a deck of 52 cards of targets, but every time you mistakenly kill an innocent family, you expand the number of your enemies so that by the time you are halfway through the deck of cards, you now have a kill list of 3000 names.
Another example of the self-fulfilling nature is the American born muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in Yemen by a US drone strike, and then shortly afterwards his 16 year old son was also killed. Scahill talks with al-Awlaki's father in Yemen while Anwar al-Awlaki is still alive. The father is about the issue of whether it is Constitutional to assassinate US citizens without trial for views they are expressing when they are not operationally involved in terrorism. Scahill also outlines, using recorded footage of Anwar al-Awlaki in America, the path taken from all-American kid (with photos at Disneyland), to a moderate Muslim cleric living in the USA, who outspoken against any kind of life-for-life retaliation against Americans after 9/11, to an Osama bin Laden like promoter of Jihad.
Also while in Yemen, Scahill goes to a Bedouin camp that was targeted by a US cruise missile. The initial media reporting of this incident was that it was an Al Quaeda training camp that had been attacked by Yemeni government forces. A Yemeni reporter who went to the site shortly after the attack reported that it was a Bedouin camp that had been attacked by the US. He was imprisoned by the Yemeni authorities the next day. There were protests by Yemeni against his imprisonment and campaigns for his release. The Yemeni leader (king?) was going to release the journalist, but then received word from President Obama advising against releasing him. Scahill tracks down this Presidential memo.
The US special forces JSOC have had their funding increased by several billion dollars under the Obama administration. One anonymous Special Forces operative interviewed made a comment that JSOC was like a giant hammer, and as long as that hammer existed, it was always going to be looking for a nail.
I thought Scahill made a bit much of JSOC being mysterious and unknown until the alleged killing of Osama Bin Laden was announced to be a JSOC operation. Robert Kaplan's 2005 book
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground describes similar Special Operations forces of in Afghanistan, although they are described as JSOTF (Joint Special Operations Task Force) rather than JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command).
In contrast to Scahill's film, Kaplan's book is more of an admiring look at the Special Operations forces, and how innovative their use is in difficult circumstances. Here is a quote from Kaplan's book:
Maj. Holiday smiled, deliberately rubbing his chin. [. . .] "Afghanistan is not like other countries. It's a throwback. You've got to compromise and go a little native. Another thing," he went on, "ever since 5th Group was here in '01, Afghans have learned not to tangle with the bearded Americans. Afghanistan needs more SF, less conventional troops, but it's not that easy because SF is already overstretched in its deployments."
Holiday had a tough, lonely job. He was the middleman between the firebase and Bagram. Bagram wanted no beads, no alcohol, no porn, no pets, and very safe, well-thought-out missions. The guys here wanted to go wild and crazy, breaking all the rules just as 5th Group had done in the early days of the War on Terrorism, before the CJTF-180 was stood up; before the Big Army entered the picture, with its love of regulations and hatred of dynamic risk.
-Kaplan, Robert
Imperial Grunts(NY: Random House, 2005) page 210.
Scahill also mentions how he received a phone call advising him against releasing a story several hours before he was about to release it, and how his computer was hacked and part of his hard-drive copies.
The extra on the DVD goes into the process of how difficult it is for an embedded journalist to take the extra step to get an independent viewpoint. From being in a position where you are fed stories daily, accompanied by all the visual and video footage you need, you have to ring your producer, tell them you are going to need extra money to go out on your own, as you will need to hire some extra guides, who will want to be paid. Also you will have to tell your producer you won't be able to send in daily stories anymore, but possibly you might come up with a story at some unknown point in time, which might or might not attract much attention, or alternatively you might be killed, for which the producer might then be held partly liable also.