Obama's Crimes 20

Scahill: Dirty Wars Institutionalized Despite Obama Promises

Tuesday, 28 May 2013 13:24By Sarah Jaffe, Truthout | Interview

In his new book, the New York Times-bestselling Dirty Wars, investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill takes us on a tour through the United States' descent into neverending war, showing us the decisions that were made that led us to this place, where, as multiple sources tell him, "the world is a battlefield."

Expanding on the work he began in Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Scahill traces the rise of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the super-secret special ops force that became central first to Bush's and now to Obama's strategy for combating terrorism. Night raids, cruise missiles, and yes, drones, figure in this story, but it's also a story of how we got here - where just last week, the president admitted for the first time in public to killing United States citizens, including 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

In addition to the book, Scahill collaborated with filmmaker Rick Rowley to create a film, also called Dirty Wars, which hits theaters June 7. The names are the same, but the projects are very different - while the book is a 600-page tome filled with impeccable research and years of history, the film is a trip along with Scahill as he discovers JSOC, trails them from a remote part of Afghanistan to Yemen and Somalia, and deals along the way with the emotional fallout from chasing heartbreaking, horrifying stories around the world. A stunning visual achievement, the film brings to life the characters we meet in the pages of the book, from anonymous sources to the family members of those killed by US weapons.

Scahill took some time to talk with me about the book, the film and the strands that make up American "national security" policy. In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I worked closely with Scahill as an intern at the Nation in 2009, and that without his help I probably would not have the career I have today. As he says, there is no such thing as objective journalism - we just have to tell people where we stand and hope that they trust us enough to come along for the ride.

We talked about drones, about journalism, about the ways anti-communist policy merged into anti-terrorist policy, and much more.

You can read the 600-page Dirty Wars and support Truthout by ordering it here for a minimum contribution of $40.

Sarah Jaffe: So much of the conversation about targeted killing has been focused on drones, and it sometimes seems like the real story is obscured in the obsession about the technology. Your book goes well beyond that. Do you think the drone obsession leads people to miss a lot of the story? 

Jeremy Scahill: There's very little new in war except technology.

I understand why people are concerned about drones. The idea that you have guys sitting in trailers in the Southwest of the US bombing Pakistan and Yemen and then getting into their SUVs and driving off their base past a sign that says "Buckle up, this is the most dangerous part of your day" just seems to epitomize everything that's wrong with war and the way that the US fights its wars. You have people really playing a video game, except there are real people getting killed on the other side of the world while they sit there in these little boxes playing with a joystick of the drone controls. I also understand the concerns people have about drones being used domestically, in the US.

I do think that the over-obsessing about drones is giving cover to the fact that this is a much broader program. Some of the more devastating tactics that are being used by the US don't even involve drones. You've got an incredible number of night raids that have taken place in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen that go unreported. Cruise missiles are a heinous devastating weapon. The biggest death toll caused by a US strike in Yemen that we know of was the first strike that Obama authorized, against the village of al Majala. That was a cruise missile attack and they used cluster bombs, which are like flying land mines. And that was launched without having to risk US military lives; it was launched from a submarine in the ocean.

In other words, if it's a drone or a cruise missile or it's an AC-130 attack, the issue should be the policy, that the constitutional law professor, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Democratic president has asserted the right to assassinate people in any country where he deems, in secret, there's a national security threat posed.

SJ: Obama said from the beginning that he would use unilateral force in pursuit of Bin Laden, that he would strike inside Pakistan, but on the other hand, of course, he's also broken a lot of promises. There seems to be this interesting tension between people who want to say, "I knew all along he was going to be terrible," and "Oh my god, this is just horrifyingly disappointing." But I think your book leaves a space for both of those things.

JS: The way I see it is, anybody who thought that Obama was going to be this sort of pacifist or dovish president was only paying attention to his stump speeches and not reading any of his policy papers - or looking at who he had around him advising him. It was pretty clear that he was going with establishment, national-security-hawkish Democrats. He chose one of them as his running mate; he chose one of them as his Secretary of State. So I do think it's a little bit disingenuous when people say "I was hoodwinked by Obama; he told us he was going to do all of this stuff and he didn't do it." He made it pretty clear that he was going to be a pretty hawkish president.

On the flip side, it's not so much that he turned his back on his promises; he's kind of fudged "Hope and Change." The issue of Guantanamo is a complicated one because on the one hand, the Republicans are blocking the funding and have been total obstructionists. On the other hand, when Obama wants to get something done, he would send people like Rahm Emanuel to Capitol Hill to kneecap people and ensure that it was going to get pushed through. The failure to close Guantanamo is the failure of both Republicans and the White House.

But the reason that I say that he's fudging the Hope and Change stuff is because if you look at the executive orders that he issued his first week in office, they told people it was going to dismantle the Bush-Cheney torture unaccountability apparatus. What I've seen in my investigation is while Obama has closed down the CIA's black sites, he's instead using other nations' black sites to interrogate prisoners. He's continued the use of rendition. He has made the interrogation tactics used by US representatives in various war zones compliant with the US Army Field Manual, but the US Army Field Manual has tactics in it that I think reasonable people would call torture. I think in every case where he claims to have ended the Bush-era programs, he's found a way to kind of rebrand it, tweak it, then sell it back to the public as a more humane, clean way of waging war, and it's just not the case. A lot of it is just theatrics.

SJ: In reading, I kept thinking about the performance of masculinity, that there was this hyper-testosterone-laden policy and rhetoric under Cheney and Rumsfeld. And that quiets down somewhat under Obama, but it seems like the major shift is rhetoric rather than policy.

Further Reading: 

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16627-scahill-expanded-executive-cia-and-pentagon-powers-institutionalize-dirty-wars-despite-obama-promises