“Dirty Wars”: How the US Declares the World a Battlefield

In the interview with Kontext TV at a discussion at Harvard University the investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill talks about his latest book: “Dirty Wars. The World Is a Battlefield”. After his best-selling book about the mercenary army “Blackwater” Scahill presents again a ground breaking investigation of US warfare. This time he sheds light on the covered operations of the Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC), essentially a private army of the US president, says Scahill. Around the world JSOC is undertaking tens of thousands of night raids, targeted killings, acts of sabotage or drone strikes in over 70 countries year by year, beyond effective control by US Congress or media attention. He narrates hauntingly the stories of the American Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16 year old son Abdulrahman and the pregnant women of the Afghan village Gardez, all killed in JSOC operations. “We are becoming the force that we seek to destroy. We run the risk of looking like we have no morality at all”. We also talked to the director of the documentary film “Dirty Wars” Richard Rowley who received an award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Furthermore Kontext TV shows parts of a discussion at Harvard University in which Jeremy Scahill and US critic Noam Chomsky discuss the “hidden wars” and the advancing warfare technology while putting them in context of US foreign policy. Noam Chomsky: “These resources are there, they are growing, they have a self-generating capacity and they are going to get larger and larger and they want to have more and more to do and when one target disappears the next comes up somewhere else”.

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