[OccupyCU] DIRTY WARS movie night this Saturday

[jesse phillippe]

Hey all,
The ISO Champaign will be having a movie night this Saturday.
We will be watching Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill's documentary on secret U,S,
wars and drone attacks around the world.


*When: Doors open at 7:30. Movie starts at 8:30-ish*
*Where: 716 S. New St. in Champaign*

Please RSVP so that we can have an idea of how many to expect

Drinks Provided. Donations welcome.

Check out a review of the movie below:
____________________________________________


http://socialistworker.org/2013/06/13/their-battlefield-is-everywhere

Review: Samuel Charles
Their battlefield is everywhere

Samuel Charles reviews a dramatic new film by independent journalist Jeremy
Scahill.
 June 13, 2013

[image: Jeremy Scahill reporting in Dirty Wars]Jeremy Scahill
reporting in *Dirty
Wars*

THE RAGGED, 4 a.m. streets of Kabul, the worn buildings, the almost total
absence of street lights. A camera crew sets up shop at a roadside in the
city, and Jeremy Scahill begins another pre-dawn broadcast from Afghanistan.

The opening scene of *Dirty Wars*, Scahill's film accompanied by a book of
the same name, is appropriately shadowy and wrapped in obscurity. Like much
of the battle zones of the "war on terror," even Afghanistan, where a
U.S.-led war continues to claim lives, debate surrounding this war, and
much media attention has disappeared, leaving these regions shrouded in a
kind of information blackout.

Cut to Khatabeh, Afghanistan, a parched-looking village half a day's drive
through the mountains from Kabul. Amid the small earthen homes of Khatabeh,
Scahill speaks to men who recount to him a night raid: bearded American
soldiers rappelling down from a helicopter in darkness into the middle of a
wedding the men were celebrating, killing villagers as they see them,
including two pregnant women and an American-trained police chief.

They then blindfold a group of villagers and fly them off to another
province to be interrogated, never letting them see where they've been
taken. Sitting cross-legged in the sitting room of a home, another villager
shows Scahill a cell-phone video of the bodies of the dead, with the voices
of these faceless American soldiers coldly rehearsing their version of
events, their pale hands pointing to bullet holes in the corpses.

Another man, face crumpled in anguish, describes to Scahill how the
Americans used knives to dig the bullets out of the bodies to cover their
tracks. "If the Americans do this again, we are ready to shed our blood
fighting them," one villager tells Scahill and his crew.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*DIRTY WARS* is the brilliantly investigated and artfully produced story of
JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite military force
established in 1980. Spread across multiple military branches, JSOC answers
directly to the American president.
  Review:

*Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield* <http://dirtywars.org/>

, a documentary by Richard Rowley, based on the
book<http://www.perseusbooks.com/perseus/book_detail.jsp?isbn=156858671X>by
Jeremy Scahill.

The force is so secret that Congress is kept in the dark about its
operations, often unaware, for example, that at one point as many as 22
night raids were being conducted *each night* in Afghanistan, knocking off
names on the ever-expanding "kill lists." Not at all confined to
Afghanistan, former JSOC special operatives recount to Scahill how their
units were used to get rid of insurgent leaders throughout the war in Iraq
as well.

These kill lists are constantly growing with the names of those whom
executive bodies deem enemies. Supposedly under congressional oversight,
these lists can only be seen by certain congressmen and cannot be
documented. "There are at least three separate sets of kill lists," Scahill
said in an interview on *Democracy
Now!*<http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/24/the_world_is_a_battlefield_jeremy>
"There's the kill list that the CIA has, there's the Joint Special
Operations Command, and there's the National Security Council list that
contains certain high value individuals that the U.S. wants taken out."

In one especially chilling scene, a former JSOC operative reaches out to
Scahill. He is interviewed in the dark, his voice distorted to conceal his
identity. The anonymous source calls these secret teams of assassins, who
do not operate by the conventions of international law, a "hammer," saying,
"For the rest of our generation, this force will be continually searching
for a nail."

This, the film tells us, is the logic of a publicly unaccountable death
squad that operates outside the jurisdiction of any law except that of the
White House.

There is a broader point to be made here that I don't think always comes
through in the film. Though *Dirty Wars* describes how forces like JSOC are
the result of the American "war on terror" allowed to run wild, the problem
isn't a war machine out of the control of its master.

Indeed, cruise missile attacks wiping out whole communities of civilians in
Yemen, the outsourcing of U.S. dirty work against Somali insurgents to
warlords in Mogadishu and night raids in Afghanistan--mostly under the
aegis of JSOC--are *deliberate* efforts by the American ruling class to
gain control of geostrategic area like the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean
and Central Asia.

Conventional wars of occupation like Iraq had become hugely unpopular as
the death toll continued to rise long after "victory" was declared--in a
2010 CBS News poll, 72 percent of respondents said the war was not worth
it. Further, with tremendous financial burdens making it impossible to
continue empire building this way, the U.S. military shifted tack.

JSOC'S special teams of assassins, drones and allied warlords have been
employed to kill anyone the government supposes "a threat." With less
danger of American lives being lost in battle and smaller forces to fund,
the U.S. ruling class believes it can now expand the frontiers of its
economic and political control without running the risk of becoming
overstretched or provoking widespread popular resistance to its campaigns.
And by way of the constant threat of violence from drone strikes or
commando teams, it is attempting to terrorize into submission would-be
resisters in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

*DIRTY WARS* does a great service to the public discussion on American
foreign policy in the "war on terror." Mainstream news media in the U.S.
rarely, if ever, critically discuss the changing face of American wars
abroad and their human impact, particularly those undeclared by White House.

More importantly, few media outlets or journalists connect the dots between
drones, U.S.-allied warlords and oppressive legislation at home. *Dirty
Wars* does this, particularly in its look at the life of cleric Anwar
al-Awlaki, an American Muslim imam of Yemeni descent.

Al-Awlaki, raised in New Mexico, at first preached nonviolence to his
congregations in the wake of 9/11 and the repression of Muslims that
followed. Over time, however, al-Awlaki grew more radical, and he came to
top the government's kill lists. With there is no evidence that al-Awlaki
ever committed an attack against Americans, the U.S. government began to
hunt him after he moved to Yemen.

In September 2011, after several botched attempts, al-Awlaki was killed in
an American drone strike, with no charges against him or due process of
law. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was also
incinerated in a drone strike while eating with his friends. Abdulrahman
had gone traveling through Yemen to search for his father. He was condemned
to death, it appears, for being the son of an anti-American preacher.

Executing American citizens without charges or due process of law, or
formal explanations for their targeting (in the case of Abdulrahman
al-Awlaki) sets a terrifying precedent in the U.S. legal system and how it
fights its wars. *Dirty Wars* takes a look at this issue too, through
Scahill's interviews with Congress members in the quiet halls of the
Capitol, who, though nearly gagged by confidentiality orders, stridently
object to the secret powers to kill with which the president has been
endowed.

Most importantly, perhaps, *Dirty Wars* shows us how the "war on terror" is
anything but that. Not only is terror from drones, warlord militias and
commandos being rained down upon Afghanis, Yemenis and Somalis, but this
war is driving more and more desperate people to take up arms against the
U.S.

If the purpose of these dirty wars abroad is to stop terrorism, then they
are a failure. But if the logic of these wars is something else--like
spreading the power of the ruling elite and creating more violence only to
justify their own existence--then, as the scenes in *Dirty Wars* confirm,
they are rapidly succeeding. A film like this one, however, can help bring
these wars into the light of day, and give energy to the movement needed to
end them.


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ISO Resources:
internationalsocialist.org
haymarketbooks.org
socialistworker.org
isreview.org
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