[Peace-discuss] "DIRTY WARS" - ISO movie night this Saturday

Fri Nov 8 16:28:03 UTC 2013

The ISO is showing the excellent film, Dirty Wars, in Champaign this 
Saturday evening.

If you're likely to come, please RSVP so they'll know how many people to 
expect - on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/events/1377694722474579) 
or by e-mail (iso.champaign at gmail.com).

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	DIRTY WARS movie night this Saturday
Date: 	Wed, 6 Nov 2013 18:07:55 -0600
From: 	ISO Champaign <iso.champaign at gmail.com>
To: 	undisclosed-recipients:;

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*

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

Jeremy Scahill reporting in Dirty WarsJeremy 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:
isochampaign.org <http://isochampaign.org>
internationalsocialist.org <http://internationalsocialist.org>
haymarketbooks.org <http://haymarketbooks.org>
socialistworker.org <http://socialistworker.org>
isreview.org <http://isreview.org>
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