Dirty Wars

The third of the nominees for Best Documentary Feature I'm taking a look at is Dirty Wars, directed by Richard Rowley. There have been many documentaries lately about the U.S. military abroad, but this one is an old-fashioned reporter-using-shoe-leather kind of story, with an intrepid journalist uncovering that the government was secretly targeting and killing people in countries without declared wars--even U.S. citizens.

Jeremy Scahill is our guide, and as the film began I was a little put off by his inserting himself into the story. He kept referring to his many years of war reporting, as if he were the second coming of Ernie Pyle. But eventually I put that aside and got involved in the story.

It starts with a raid by U.S. soldiers on a house in Afghanistan. They killed a handful of people, including two pregnant women. Of course the government denied any involvement (one of the witnesses saw the soldiers pulling the bullets out of the bodies to cover their tracks), but eventually an Admiral visited and personally apologized to the family, giving them a sheep in restitution. That was William McRaven, whom Scahill finds out is the head of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, which was started in 1980 and is basically the White House's personal death squad.

This is a provocative film, in that it takes on Barack Obama from the left. He is portrayed as being no different than any Republican when it comes to the misguided war on terror. Scahill reports that Obama personally interceded to keep a journalist in jail in Yemen, and that he put a U.S. citizen, Anwar Al-Awlaki, on a hit list. Al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike, and just a week or two his sixteen-year-old son was killed the same way.

It's all strong stuff, but here's the problem: it was not even-handed. Scahill, who started with Democracy Now! and now writes for The Nation, is a liberal muckraker, and god bless for him that. But I wanted to hear the other side. I felt like a juror who only heard one lawyer's case. Scahill interviews Al-Awlaki's father and mother, who said he was completely innocent. Indeed, it appears his greatest crime was to make "death to America" type statements on the Internet. But there could be more. Also, JSOC came out of hiding to proclaim their success in killing Osama bin Laden. Scahill begrudgingly gives them credit, but says he wasn't happy about it.

Where the film makes the greatest point is in outlining the regressive war on terror. Al-Awlaki, who preached against violence, was radicalized by his treatment by the government (Scahill does not point out he was arrested twice for solicitation of prostitutes, which may have furthered his exodus from the U.S.) But it is a point well taken, that bludgeoning a people is not exactly winning fans. For every innocent family wiped out by mistake by a murderous band of special forces, hundreds of opponents spring in their wake. One person interviewed describes JSOC as a "hammer in search of a nail."

With our troops still in Afghanistan after a decade, this has clearly been a failed policy. I have no problem with targeting Al-Qaeda leaders who are responsible for murder being targeted wherever they reside--this is a  global battlefield, as Scahill is told--but surely a U.S. citizen deserves a trial. It's all disheartening.