Covering the secret army
Journalist Jeremy Scahill exposes holes in U.S. military ops
The sinking feeling comes around the midway point in Rick Rowley’s documentary, shortly after we’re presented with the images of dead babies and lifeless children stacked like cordwood in the dust.
They were members of a poor Yemeni tribe, and the movie alleges they were murdered by the U.S. military as part of a large-scale, but covert, war being carried out by drones and black ops in various parts of the Arab world.
The heartbreaking pictures of swaddled corpses come with eyewitness testimony from survivors who talk of early morning raids by American soldiers, which are followed by official bouts of denial by various levels of government.
What makes this all so nauseating isn’t the suggestion that U.S. military forces are indiscriminately killing innocents in undeclared war zones as part of the “war on terror.” What makes it suffocating is the fact that a decade after George W. Bush pushed American might down the throat of the Middle East by launching a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the casual viewer in North America is numb to the collective misery.
We’ve seen so many images of women mourning dead babies behind burkas, so many shots of angry men burning flags and parading the bloodied bodies of the latest martyr through the streets, that it’s all starting to look generic, expected and worst of all, unmoving.
No wonder our central subject in Dirty Wars feels so betrayed. Jeremy Scahill is an award-winning reporter and author who penned Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
As national security correspondent for The Nation, Scahill was on assignment in the Afghanistan when he started to notice the gaping holes in every press briefing. UN security forces would hand out a list of operations that had taken place the night before, with the numbers of killed and captured, but there was never any record of which unit or personnel had done the dirty work.
Scahill says it was as if there was a secret army that was hard at work killing people in the dead of night, leaving no record of their country of origin.
He realized he would have to leave the confines of the embedded media pool, and venture into the restricted zones of a country that was beginning to loathe America with an ever peaking passion.
He takes us to Gardez, located near the hills of Tora Bora, where we hear about a nighttime raid that left two pregnant women dead as well as the head of the local police, a man who had been trained by U.S. military to keep order — and a noted villain of the Taliban.
Scahill is shocked by his discovery because it was never fully explained in any press briefing. And then, we hear why: The U.S. forces who allegedly carried out this action stuck their Bowie knives into the victims — while they were still alive — to retrieve the bullets and remove any evidence of American involvement.
A few scenes later, Scahill realizes the raid on Gardez was just a pinhole on the big picture. What happened in Gardez appeared to be taking place all over the Arab world. Hundreds and hundreds of raids were taking place weekly, leaving mountains of human flesh in its wake. Scahill’s case is compelling and based on hard evidence, but when he returns to the U.S., he becomes a talk-show piñata. Every talking head in a tie thinks he or she knows more than the reporter who spent time on the ground, and dismisses his findings as leftie propaganda or irrelevant given the security of the nation is at stake.
So what if a few babies and pregnant women die to protect the American way? It’s a war, after all.
And so this movie sucks the air out of you one breath at a time because it’s clear we’re no longer capable of moral outrage, and in the end, that’s why Dirty Wars is as powerful as it is. Sure, the content alone is a powder keg of lies and cover-ups and government double talk, but it’s Scahill’s own insertion into the story that brings it a human scale and separates it from a standard piece of news gathering.
Scahill feels moral outrage. And while watching him talk about his adventures in war zones feels a little too egoistic at the beginning, his betrayal at the overall ambivalence of an entire population is what gives this movie teeth.
He’s the fleshy piece of litmus paper, and over the course of Dirty Wars, we watch him turn a vibrant pink from the exposure to corrosive lies. The angrier he gets, the more compelled he is to act, until he becomes a person of interest to American intelligence and gets hacked by his own government.
By the end of this depressing documentary, it becomes obvious that telling the truth in these days of wholesale subterfuge is a very dangerous thing to do. Journalists disappear every day, and no one seems to care, leaving stubborn soldiers such as Scahill in the kill zone.
Moral outrage used to be the great protector of human values, but as Dirty Wars makes all too clear, we’re not only losing our grasp of morality, we’re too ambivalent and self-involved to feel outrage at the fate of the Other.