by STEVE FAKE
Director Rick Rowley and journalist Jeremy Scahill’s much talked about docu-thriller Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield opened on June 7th to strong positive reviews. A companion piece to Scahill’s book of the same name, Dirty Wars details the growing use of extrajudicial assassinations by the U.S. executive branch to strike at targets around the planet, without any declaration of war or meaningful congressional oversight. And it documents the human toll of such unchecked power by featuring some of the innocent victims of this global war.
The film is anchored by several key stories that will be quite familiar to regular Democracy Now! viewers and followers of Scahill’s reporting, though in the movie each episode is presented in extended, intimate detail. We meet surviving family members and see on-the-ground footage that conveys a sense of place amidst scenes that are often, by turns, touching or grisly.
Viewers learn of the innumerable, unaccountable night-time raids upon homes conducted in Afghanistan by U.S. and allied forces. NATO provides virtually zero information about these operations. Journalists are habitually restricted from investigating the aftermath of these raids that terrorize proud farming villages in the middle of the night.
We meet a family in Gardez, where five innocent civilians—all related, including two pregnant women—were shot and killed by U.S. forces in February 2010. The soldiers, who had crashed a familial celebration marking the birth of a child, took action to cover up the unprovoked attack by removing bullets from the bodies and carefully rehearsing their cover story. The family had no links to the Taliban, let alone plans to attack the United States. The very idea that peasants in a remote province in the Hindu Kush mountain range pose a threat to the United States is sufficiently absurd that it gives the lie to Washington’s motivations for the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Recall that the obvious response to 9/11 would have been a focused police action, eminently feasible but never pursued, to apprehend the responsible figures in al-Qaeda. Instead we got a military invasion and a war against the Taliban.
Foreign Policy in Focus for more
(Thanks to Feroz Mehdi of Alternatives International)