Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill's antidote to Zero Dark Thirty's heroic narrative

[Judi Lynn]

Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill's antidote to Zero Dark Thirty's heroic narrative

In this new documentary, the Nation's investigative reporter lifts the lid on the ugly reality of US counter-terror operations

Amy Goodman
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 January 2013 14.56 EST

As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film's director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill.

The increasing pace of US drone strikes, and the Obama administration's reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a US press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama's new bangs. Dirty Wars, along with Scahill's forthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence … with a bang that matters.

Scahill and Rowley, no strangers to war zones, ventured beyond Kabul, Afghanistan, south to Gardez, in Paktia province, a region dense with armed Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, to investigate one of the thousands of night raids that typically go unreported. Scahill told me:

"In Gardez, US special operations forces had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and … Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the US."

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/28/dirty-wars-jeremy-scahill-zero-dark-thirty

[joelz]

1. Remarkable film

so sad that many here don't want to know about terror Tuesday. More at

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/1/22/dirty_wars_jeremy_scahill_and_rick

[Solly Mack]

2. k/r

[akhen]

3. Democracy Now

I just saw the interview with Scahill on Democracy Now and I am glad he is doing some real reporting on this subject. Thank you for posting this.

[Ash_F]

4. US soldiers are digging bullets out of corpses with knives?

[polly7]

8. I was just reading that .... horrible.

JEREMY SCAHILL: And we’ll talk about that, yeah. So we had read about this night raid that took place, and it was a horrible massacre. And what happened in Gardez was that U.S. special operations forces had intelligence that there were—you know, a Taliban cell was in a—was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid this house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and another person that they killed in the house, Mohammed Daoud, turned out to be a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the U.S., including by the mercenary—or the private security company MPRI, Military Professional Resources Incorporated. They weren’t even Pashtun, the dominant—the almost exclusive ethnicity of the Taliban. They spoke Dari. And they’re—and what was happening that night was not preparing a suicide bomber; they were celebrating the birth of a child. And they were dancing and had music, and they had women without head covers on.

And they—and so the soldiers raid this house, and they kill these people. And instead of realizing that they had made a horrible mistake and that the intelligence was wrong and it resulted in these people being killed, they actually covered up the killings. And we interview the survivors of this raid, including a man who watched, while he was zip-cuffed, soldiers, American soldiers, digging bullets out of his wife’s dead body. And they then tried to—

AMY GOODMAN: And they did that because?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, so just to finish this part of it, they kill the people, they dig the bullets our of the bodies, then they take into custody all of the men of the house, including a man who has just watched his sister and his wife and his niece killed, and they fly them to a different province, and they’re interrogating them, trying to get them to give up some information that would indicate that the Taliban had a connection to that family. I mean, it shows you how horrid the intelligence is. I mean, these people weren’t even Pashtun. You have a senior police commander. They’re dancing, playing loud music, and they have women without head cover in the house. And what happened is that NATO then issues a press release and made statements anonymously in the media where they said that the U.S. forces had stumbled upon the aftermath of a Taliban honor killing, and they implied that the family—that the women were killed by their own murderous families.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/14088-dirty-wars-jeremy-scahill-and-rick-rowleys-new-film-exposes-hidden-truths-of-covert-us-warfare

[MattSh]

5. Things like this need to top the Greatest Threads list.

Until it does, even relatively enlightened places like DU will continue to have their collective heads in the sand.

[Uncle Joe]

6. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Judi Lynn.

[polly7]

7. K&R. nt.

[rachel1]

9. K&R War is the health of the state and civil & suspects will be slaughtered recklessly as long as

they're being slaughtered in the name of democracy/freedom/security/whatever deceitful reasons.