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The ISO is showing the excellent film, Dirty Wars, in Champaign this
Saturday evening.<br>
<br>
If you're likely to come, please RSVP so they'll know how many
people to expect - on facebook (<a
href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1377694722474579">https://www.facebook.com/events/1377694722474579</a>)
or by e-mail (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:iso.champaign@gmail.com">iso.champaign@gmail.com</a>).<br>
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<td>DIRTY WARS movie night this Saturday</td>
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<th nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE" align="RIGHT">Date: </th>
<td>Wed, 6 Nov 2013 18:07:55 -0600</td>
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<th nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE" align="RIGHT">From: </th>
<td>ISO Champaign <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:iso.champaign@gmail.com"><iso.champaign@gmail.com></a></td>
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<td>undisclosed-recipients:;</td>
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<div>Hey all,<br>
</div>
The ISO Champaign will be having a movie night this
Saturday.<br>
</div>
We will be watching Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill's
documentary on secret U,S, wars and drone attacks around
the world.<br>
<br>
</div>
<b>When: Doors open at 7:30. Movie starts at 8:30-ish<br>
</b></div>
<b>Where: 716 S. New St. in Champaign</b><br>
<br>
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Check out a review of the movie below:<br>
____________________________________________<br clear="all">
<br>
<div class=""><span class=""><br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://socialistworker.org/2013/06/13/their-battlefield-is-everywhere">http://socialistworker.org/2013/06/13/their-battlefield-is-everywhere</a><br>
<br>
Review</span>: <span class="">Samuel Charles</span></div>
<h1 class="">Their battlefield is everywhere</h1>
<div class="">
<p><span class="">Samuel Charles</span> reviews a dramatic new
film by independent journalist Jeremy Scahill.</p>
</div>
<div class="">June 13, 2013</div>
<div class="">
<p><span class="" style="width:330px"><span class=""><img
moz-do-not-send="true"
src="http://socialistworker.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/330/images/Dirty%20Wars%20still.jpg"
alt="Jeremy Scahill reporting in Dirty Wars"
title="Jeremy Scahill reporting in Dirty Wars"
class="" height="217" width="330"></span><span
class="">Jeremy Scahill reporting in <i>Dirty Wars</i></span></span>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The opening scene of <i>Dirty Wars</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -</p>
<p><i>DIRTY WARS</i> 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.</p>
<div class="">
<div id="node-22642" class="">
<div class="">
<div class=""> <span class="">Review:</span> </div>
<div class="">
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://dirtywars.org/"><i>Dirty Wars: The
World Is a Battlefield</i></a>, a documentary by
Richard Rowley, based on the <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.perseusbooks.com/perseus/book_detail.jsp?isbn=156858671X">book</a>
by Jeremy Scahill.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>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 <i>each
night</i> 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.</p>
<p>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
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/24/the_world_is_a_battlefield_jeremy">interview
on <i>Democracy Now!</i></a> "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."</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>There is a broader point to be made here that I don't think
always comes through in the film. Though <i>Dirty Wars</i>
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.</p>
<p>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 <i>deliberate</i>
efforts by the American ruling class to gain control of
geostrategic area like the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and
Central Asia.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -</p>
<p><i>DIRTY WARS</i> 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.</p>
<p>More importantly, few media outlets or journalists connect
the dots between drones, U.S.-allied warlords and oppressive
legislation at home. <i>Dirty Wars</i> does this,
particularly in its look at the life of cleric Anwar
al-Awlaki, an American Muslim imam of Yemeni descent.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. <i>Dirty
Wars</i> 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.</p>
<p>Most importantly, perhaps, <i>Dirty Wars</i> 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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Dirty Wars</i>
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.</p>
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ISO Resources:<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://isochampaign.org">isochampaign.org</a><br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://internationalsocialist.org">internationalsocialist.org</a><br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://haymarketbooks.org">haymarketbooks.org</a><br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://socialistworker.org">socialistworker.org</a><br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://isreview.org">isreview.org</a><br>
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