by Carlos L. Diaz
Dirty Wars presents viewers with many moral, military, constitutional, and political questions. The documentary begins with Jeremy Scahill, reporter for The Nation magazine, taking the risky decision of leaving Kabul to travel to the “denied regions” of Afghanistan where secretive NATO night raids have been taking place. Scahill decided to go far beyond the “green zone” because he felt that, after a decade of war reporting, a story was missing. That story, which begins in Gardez, Afghanistan, is about night raids and drone strikes carried out by the United States government in several continents. Dirty Wars is a modest attempt to shed some light in the actions American political and military leaders have been engaged in since the beginning of the “War on Terror.”
JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) is the central focus of the documentary. More specifically, the results of JSOC’s ruthless modus operandi, which includes the killing of innocent civilians in places that many Americans cannot find on a map: Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Indonesia, Thailand, and even Panama.
In Yemen, JSOC’s fingerprints are utterly visible. Its most well-known victim in Yemen was Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American Muslim cleric who was killed in a drone strike in 2011. Through Al-Awlaki Scahill presents one of the documentary’s central themes, that the War on Terror is radicalizing young Muslims all over the globe. A brief history of Al-Awlaki’s transformation from peaceful cleric to jihad evangelist is presented in a rather convincing manner. Al-Awlaki is first shown condemning terrorism against American civilians. In the next frame he is praising the previously condemned behavior in a blog post. Finally we are introduced to a completely changed Al-Awlaki, the professorial looking Imam has abandoned his suit for a military jacket and, while sitting next to a black Islamic flag, is calling on all able Muslims to take weapons against the West.
Why did Al-Awlaki become the embodiment of what he had criticized a few years earlier? Scahill argues that Al-Awlaki’s radicalization was in direct response to U.S. actions following the terrorist attacks of September 11. After the attacks, thousands of American Muslims were unjustly imprisoned, others where beaten by paranoiac mobs, and the Bush administration invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Scahill, many Muslims interpreted such actions as an undeclared war on Islam. Al-Awlaki suffered from this persecution first-hand. He was stopped and interrogated at airports, then jailed for eighteen months—seventeen of which were spent in solitary confinement. The last drop in Al-Awlaki’s radicalization bucket was being placed in JSOC’s kill list.
The American reaction towards civilian deaths has been unacceptably timid, argues Scahill. When a group of Special Forces soldiers stormed an Afghan village in the middle of the night killing a local police commander and two pregnant women, the U.S. military blamed the incident on the Taliban. After a video showing the American soldiers removing the bullets from the bodies surfaced, a goat was sent to the villagers as compensation for their loss. A similar story played out in Yemen, where one of the poorest villages in that country was targeted by American missiles resulting in the deaths of about a dozen people, including children. In this case the Yemeni government took responsibility for the strike, until Abdulelah Haider Shaye, a prominent Yemeni journalist, revealed the truth about who was behind the attacks. Abdulelah was accused of being an Al-Qaeda operative and sentenced to five years in prison. His imprisonment was not taken well by the Yemeni public and the outrage led Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president at the time, to consider pardoning Abdulelah. This pardon never became a reality because president Obama personally asked his Yemeni counterpart to not grant the pardon. Al-Awlaki’s sixteen year old son was killed in a drone strike a few weeks after his father, while eating at a restaurant in the Yemeni capital. The American government did not offer an apology to the teen’s family. Instead they called his death “collateral damage.”
I have never adhered to the theory that terrorists attack the United States because Israel occupies the West Bank or the United States maintains a military presence in Muslim nations. Scahill’s theory should not be confused with one that apologizes for Islamic fascism–a theory held by some like George Galloway. The argument offered in Dirty Wars is more nuanced and the evidence presented is hard to ignore. The eyes of children who witnessed their relatives being murdered by a group of bearded Americans, or as a local tribesman calls them “the American Taliban,” are overflowing with anger. Anwar Al-Awlaki’s father will never understand why the United States killed his son without presenting any evidence against him. He certainly will never understand why they killed his teenage grandson who planned to return to the United States two days after he was obliterated by an American drone. Scahill offers a possible answer, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was not killed for who he was, “but for who he might one day become.”
Everyone should watch Dirty Wars (available on Netflix) and reach their own conclusions about whether the “War on Terror” is a self-fulfilling prophecy or something else.
Eclectic Affinities 