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. \u201cDirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield\u201d reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film\u2019s director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill. The increasing pace of U.S. drone strikes, and the Obama administration\u2019s 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 U.S. press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama\u2019s new bangs. \u201cDirty Wars,\u201d along with Scahill\u2019s forthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence … with a bang that matters.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Scahill told me: \u201cIn Gardez, U.S. 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 U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scahill and Rowley went to the heart of the story, to hear from people who live at the target end of U.S. foreign policy. In Gardez, they interviewed survivors of that violent raid on the night of Feb. 12, 2010. After watching his brother and his wife, his sister and his niece killed by U.S. special forces, Mohammed Sabir was handcuffed on the ground. He watched, helpless, as the U.S. soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife\u2019s corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown off by helicopter to another province.<\/p>\n
Sabir recounted his ordeal for Rowley\u2019s camera: \u201cMy hands and clothes were caked with blood. They didn\u2019t give us water to wash the blood away. The American interrogators had beards and didn\u2019t wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages. By the time I got home, all our dead had already been buried. Only my father and my brother were left at home. I didn\u2019t want to live anymore. I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans. But my brother and my father wouldn\u2019t let me. I wanted a jihad against the Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before leaving, Scahill and Rowley made copies of videos from the cellphones of survivors. One demonstrated that it was not a Taliban meeting, but a lively celebration of the birth of a child that the raid interrupted. Rowley described another video: \u201cYou can hear voices come over it, and they\u2019re American-accented voices speaking about piecing together their version of the night\u2019s killings, getting their story straight. You hear them trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre.\u201d<\/p>\n
The film shows an image captured in Gardez, by photographer Jeremy Kelly, sometime after the massacre. It showed a U.S. admiral named McRaven, surrounded by Afghan soldiers, offering a sheep as a traditional gesture seeking forgiveness for the massacre. The cover-up had failed.<\/p>\n
William McRaven headed the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. Following the thread of JSOC, painstakingly probing scarcely reported night raids, traveling from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia, Scahill\u2019s reporting, along with Rowley\u2019s incredible camerawork, constructs for the first time a true, comprehensive picture of JSOC and Commander in Chief Obama\u2019s not-so-brave new world.<\/p>\n
The Inauguration Day drone strike in Yemen was the fourth in as many days, along with a similar increase in strikes in Pakistan. The Washington Post reported that Obama has a \u201cplaybook\u201d that details when drone strikes are authorized, but it reportedly exempts those conducted by the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Inauguration Day, Obama officially nominated John Brennan, a strong advocate for the \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques\u201d that many call torture, and architect of the drone program, to head the CIA.<\/p>\n
With the film \u201cDirty Wars,\u201d co-written with David Riker and directed by Rowley, Jeremy Scahill is pulling back the curtain on JSOC, which has lately exploded into the public eye with the torture-endorsing movie \u201cZero Dark Thirty,\u201d about the killing of Osama bin Laden. When \u201cDirty Wars\u201d comes to a theater near you, see it. Sadly, it proves the theater of war is everywhere, or, as its subtitle puts it: \u201cThe World Is a Battlefield.\u201d As Scahill told me, \u201cYou\u2019re going to see a very different reality, and you\u2019re going to see the hellscape that has been built by a decade of covert war.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.<\/i><\/p>\n
Amy Goodman is the host of \u201cDemocracy Now!,\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 1,000 stations in North America. She is the co-author of \u201cThe Silenced Majority,\u201d a New York Times best-seller.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u00a9 2013 Amy Goodman. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.<\/i><\/p>\n