Another ‘Dirty War’

Rick Rowley’s “Dirty Wars” begins like a film noir piece. Journalist Jeremy Scahill’s (author of “Blackwater: the rise of the world’s most powerful mercenary army”) driving around the pitch-black deserted streets of Kabul at 4 a.m.

“A city of three million. Barely a streetlight on,” Scahill says.

Scahill’s investigating a series of night raids throughout the Middle East. They all had a similar modus operandi: Americans with muscles and beards would swarm into poor villages, wounding and killing men, women and children — including pregnant women with children.

“We called them the American Taliban,” someone says.

Directed and filmed by Rowley, the Academy Award-nominated documentary gives insight on a frightening operation, which Scahill describes as a “global stop and frisk program.” Essentially, a secretive U.S. government organization called the Joint Special Operations Command is given free reign to enact a global “Project Oversight.”

One of the victims was Mohammed Daoud, an Afghanistan police commander who trained under the U.S. and fought against the Taliban. The Americans killed his wife, sister and niece.

“I didn’t want to live anymore,” Daoud says to Scahill after the incident. “I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and bomb the Americans, but my father and brother won’t let me. I wanted jihad against the Americans.”

American forces disguised some of these attacks. NATO claimed they were the result of Taliban “honor killings”; the women and children were just accidental casualties, they said.

This, says Scahill, is the secret war on terror — the “dirty war.” The war’s so dirty that in a WIN/Gallup International poll, the U.S. was declared the No. 1 threat to world peace.

This dirty war continues with today’s targeted airstrikes against ISIS groups in Iraq. It’s a formality that journalist Glenn Greenwald describes as “prettily packaged under humanitarianism.”

“It is simply mystifying how anyone can look at U.S. actions in the Middle East and still believe that the goal of its military deployments is humanitarianism,” Greenwald writes in The Intercept. “The U.S. government does not oppose tyranny and violent oppression in the Middle East. To the contrary, it is and long has been American policy to do everything possible to subjugate the populations of that region with brutal force – as conclusively demonstrated by stalwart U.S. support for the region’s worst oppressors.”

After all, America’s been funding war, supplying weapons to both sides of conflicts.

Rowley’s documentary raises disturbing questions about the U.S. military agenda. Questions that Scahill voices and broadcasts.

“As an investigative reporter, you rarely have people’s attention,” says Scahill. “More often than not, you work alone. And the stories you labor over fall on deaf years.”

But every once in a while, someone listens.

“Dirty Wars” was directed by Rick Rowley and written by Jeremy Scahill and David Riker. “Dirty Wars” was nominated for Best Documentary in the 2014 Academy Awards.

‘Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army’

In Jeremy Scahill’s book, “Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,” he describes the war in Iraq as another crusade. This time, the Catholic Church aren’t the ones offering indulgences: the U.S. government is paying mercenary soldiers to do the fighting.

This privatization had detrimental effects, said reporter Naomi Klein in a 2010 public lecture at Ithaca College. Klein wrote “The Shock Doctrine,” a book which describes how governments use tragedies (such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina) to further political agendas and economic reform.

“We always saw our two books, ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and ‘Blackwater,’ as being two sides of the same coin,” Klein said.

“Jeremy was just zeroing in on the real mercenaries, the Blackwaters and these other private companies that showed up in the chaos and that were performing the role of the police, but of course, it wasn’t in the public interest. They were protecting corporations. They were protecting developers,” she said. “No one really knew what they were doing, and Jeremy was the first one to blow the whistle on that.”

Blowing the whistle on operations such as Blackwater, Scahill shows how the company — who also hired Chile veterans from dictator Augusto Pinochet’s reign — employed mercenaries to perform tasks of the U.S. soldiers. In theory, the work of Blackwater would supplement the work of the U.S. army; however, Blackwater’s agenda wasn’t purely patriotic. Its founder, the religious security kingpin Erik Prince, was interested in financial gain.

After all, “In Iraq, the postwar business boom is not oil. It is security,” says a Times of London piece.

This is clearly shown when four Blackwater contractors were ambushed and killed in Fallujah on March 31, 2004.

This tragedy could have been prevented if Blackwater better prepared these men, Scahill argues. The four contractors were “in the middle of the volatile city that morning, not to mention in SUVs, short-staffed and under-armed,” Scahill writes.

The “shock and awe” from this event allowed Blackwater to capitalize on the situation. The four deaths were used as Blackwater propaganda; the company was now able to sell more contracts.

And so, the War on Terror becomes another merchandise that can be packaged, shipped, expedited and marketed to all.

And while Blackwater’s winning contracts, people are losing lives.

Jeremy Scahill won an Izzy Award for Independent Media for his work on “Blackwater: the rise of the world’s most powerful mercenary army.”

To read my review on Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine,” click here.