Interview: Reporter Jeremy Scahill on the Front Lines of ‘Dirty Wars’

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CHICAGO – The creator behind the provocative new documentary “Dirty Wars” is veteran investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, and he is unafraid to reveal the dirt on the perpetual conflict under the heading of the war on terror. Scahill is not a stranger to controversy, and his insertion into the film’s narrative is part of the story itself.

In going behind the scenes in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, Scahill uncovers some eye-opening circumstances regarding the use of force in the war on terror. The special unit that killed Osama Bin Laden – the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) – is also responsible for the killing of innocents in Afghanistan, and is a sector of the military that seems to have no accountability, either with Congress or the law.

Jeremy Scahill
Embedded: Jeremy Scahill (center) in ‘Dirty Wars’
Photo credit: IFC Films

The salient point the Jeremy Scahill makes in “Dirty Wars,” is that besides the war on terror having no borders, it has no rules or no end. This eliminates the United States as a so-called moral authority in waging war, and keeps expanding the potential for creating new enemies. Scahill talked to HollywoodChicago.com on June 14th, the day that “Dirty Wars” was released in Chicago.

HollywoodChicago.com: We live in a vast and diverse land mass, under one banner, working to obtain consumer goods, and generally ignoring our geopolitical wars. How do our lawmakers, branches of government and the military take advantage of this blissful ignorance in conducting these wars?

Jeremy Schahill: Look at our media culture in society right now, we live in an ‘infotainment’ atmosphere. We’re told what the ‘Real Housewives’ and reality TV stars are doing, but what’s happening with our armed forces has become a non-story. The impact of our actions are very seldom covered. Corporate sponsors of these media outlets don’t want to purchase ad time for doom-and-gloom. So we have a media culture that does a disservice to our democratic society.

On the other side of it, we have lawmakers on Capitol Hill that are totally complicit in the expanding surveillance state. They fail to ask tough questions – I don’t care what your politics are, either Democrat, Republican, liberal or conservative – we don’t have elected officials that are asking questions to those in power. Huge corporate monies influence their decisions, and we have a bankrupt media culture.

HollywoodChicago.com: What results from this?

Scahill: It’s very easy for the White House – again under any party – to do an executive power grab, because the media and Congress are ‘out to lunch’ on these issues.

HollywoodChicago.com: The perception of most Americans is that we’re ‘the good guys’ and entities like the former Communist Russia and the Muslim factions are all ‘bad guys.’ When the United States start making bad tactical decisions like the Joint Special Operation Command, what happens to our morality of ‘goodness’?

Scahill: I think we’ve lost track of our values. The last twelve years we’ve operated out of excessive fear. We’ve had laws like the Patriot Act signed because people we’re afraid, and those in power took advantage of that fear. We’re living in a moment now, in which we have a popular Democratic President who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, is a constitutional law professor by training, but who is also implementing policies that a lot of liberals would have protested had McCain won the election and done the same thing.

What I saw when I traveled around the Muslim world, is that at this point we’re creating more new enemies than we are killing terrorists. People had a lot of hope in President Obama – not just in the U.S. but in the Muslim world – that he was going to reset things. That he would back away from the idea that we’re in a perpetual state of war. The message that has been sent is that it doesn’t matter who the President is when it comes to foreign policy. American Exceptionalism is the actual policy. Although President Obama has his differences with Republicans on domestic issues, we generally have one party in this country when it comes to foreign policy.

HollywoodChicago.com: The election of Barack Obama was so overwhelmingly greeted as a positive throughout the rest of the world – so much so that as you mentioned he received the Nobel Peace Prize – which has been muddied through his actual foreign policy actions as president. Did we get a inexperienced man into office, who capitulated to the Pentagon and defense industry lobbyists, or is there a chance that he will live up to that Peace Prize with three years left?

Scahill: From my study of history, I think Barack Obama is one of the most brilliant Presidents we’ve had, just on a pure intellectual level this guy is a heavyweight. I don’t think he’s being molded on a foreign policy level by the military. I don’t, however, think he’s going to live up to that Nobel Peace Prize. He’s assured that there is going to be a perpetual state of war.

He is also asserting the right of the executive branch to kill American citizens without presenting evidence or putting them on trial. He’s expanded the drone war, and he’s President when we’re learning that the NSA has unprecedented access to data, both for Americans and foreigners.

HollywoodChicago.com: How do you think this policy was formulated by the President?

Scahill: As he came into office, he is briefed by the heavyweights. One commander is Admiral William McRaven, who heads JSOC. Another is David Petraeus, who was running the wars under Bush and Cheney. There is also the Joints Chiefs of Staff and the CIA, who are telling the President that are thousands of threats every single day, and if he doesn’t approve the authority to preemptively strike back at our enemies, there will be another attack on the Homeland.

On the other side is Obama’s people like Rahm Emanuel, who at the time was only obsessed with the President’s political legacy. In that sense, Emanuel was saying ‘we can’t have an attack on the Homeland.’ They of course don’t want an attack personally, but they also don’t want it because of that legacy. The administration went aggressively after terrorist threats, and got into an area ‘pre-crime.’ wherein if anyone has a whiff of terrorism around them, we’ll take them out.

HollywoodChicago.com: How was this a change from what Obama had campaigned on?

Scahill: He didn’t want to engage in large scale troop deployment, except in the Afghanistan surge which he campaigned on, they didn’t want to stuff people in the Guantanamo prison because of the political problems for the President, so the policy became ‘pre-crime,’ like the film ‘Minority Report.’

Most liberals in America support his drone policy, because they view it as a smarter, cleaner way to wage war. But that’s part of why I made the film, to raise these questions, not to tell people what to think. I think when you check your conscience at the door, because your guy is in power, then you put partisanship over principles. For me, liberals need to wake up and realize these policies are not so different from Bush and Cheney, so what do you really believe?

HollywoodChicago.com: You insert yourself into the story of ‘Dirty Wars.’ What was behind this decision, and how do you think it adds to this story, when most journalism schools preach an opposite point of view when it comes to reporters?

Scahill: First off, the notion of objectivity is bullsh*t. it’s a fallacy. What you have as a journalist is transparency, facts and accountability with your listeners and readers. Having said that, I didn’t want to be in the movie at all as myself. We had a four hour rough cut of the film, a year before we premiered at Sundance. I was in that cut, but more as a neutral tour guide, and it rang kind of false. I’ve never been a journalist who has been the he-said-she-said type.

We brought in David Riker, who is a screenwriter and director, who primarily works in feature films. He came on board initially to do a couple weeks of consulting, to try and help us trim it down and help us with some narrative gaps. He was the one that suggested that we were making a mistake by not being honest with the viewer, by letting them into my head or taking them on my journey. I reluctantly agreed to test it out, and in the process made a totally different film.

Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill in Afghanistan During the Filming of ‘Dirty Wars’
Photo credit: IFC Films

HollywoodChicago.com: What did you learn about yourself in this process?

Scahill: War reporters generally don’t like to absorb everything that we’ve taken in, we move from one story to the next. In the course of writing the film – and the narration is very personal – I learned a lot about myself, and how the people I’ve met over the 15 years of doing this have affected me. I don’t like first person journalism, that’s not how I write. But what I think I’ve made is a film that is accessible to people, even if you don’t pay attention to these issues on a daily basis. We wanted to take people on a journey, and part of doing that is being honest with the audience – I’m going to let you know where I stand, and you can decide whether to trust me or go on the journey with me.

HollywoodChicago.com: Since the Bush-Cheney administration allowed for so much private industry outsourcing of military operations in the Iraq and Afghan wars – including your friends at Blackwater [Scahill’s previous exposé] – how can legislators, the courts or the American people bring down such a profitable, ruthless industry that adds so much fuel to the perpetual war?

Scahill: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower currently in the news, worked for a private company, Booz Allen, which is a private military security company. 70% of the money we spend in this country on intelligence, is used to hire private contractors. You have for-profit companies with top secret security clearances, involving hundreds of thousands of employees, who have access to top secret information. Corporations for the most part aren’t patriots, they are in for the highest bidder. When we’re outsourcing these core functions, whether it’s security, intelligence or military operations, we’re removing the most sensitive business of running a state – from the sovereign realm of elected officials to private enterprises.

There is no incentive for Congress to investigate this, they’d be killing their campaign contribution cash cow. President Obama has not ended Blackwater-type firms throughout the world, he has sought to legitimize and regulate the industries, rather that saying maybe it’s not a good idea to build up private armies with taxpayer dollars.

HollywoodChicago.com: We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination, with some theories postulating that it was a coup de tat to provide the defense industry a war in Viet Nam. How do assassinations affect the moral compass of America, whether perpetuated here or against their enemies?

Scahill: There is a long history of the U.S. engaging in political assassinations, but domestically and internationally. When the various assassination committees were intervened, both in the 1970s and the 1990s, it’s at the point when Americans woke up, seeing how out of control and unaccountable the CIA, Cointelpro and the FBI were becoming. I think today we need another one of those committees – who are we killing around the world on any given day, and what are the consequences of giving those extraordinary assassination powers to the executive branch of the government?

When the state asserts the right, particularly to assassinate its own citizens, without charging them with crimes, how then are we dealing properly with the outside terrorism threat, and how does that defines us as country? This comes from the politics of fear, as the American citizens have allowed for their basic civil liberties to be eroded because of an irrational fear of terrorism. It’s been blown out of proportion.

HollywoodChicago.com: Often Americans look fondly back to the World War II-era, when the U.S. helped win the war and established their world power as ‘good guys.’ How has that attitude become counterproductive in our current war against terror, which has no boundaries?

Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill in Chicago, June 14th, 2013
Photo credit: Patrick McDonad for HollywoodChicago.com

Scahill: I think people should go back and look at the Nuremberg Trials, which set an important precedent for the world as to how to get justice after a war. But today, the United States refuses to acknowledge international law, won’t ratified the International Criminal Court, because it doesn’t want it’s own personnel to be subjected to it. I think that World War II gave this perception that the United States was the preeminent moral force in the world, and that mentality has endured to this day, but at the end of that day we have to back off of this American Exceptionalism. If we are to be that ‘shining city on a hill,’ then we should subject ourselves to the same standards that we subject the rest of the world to.

HollywoodChicago.com: Your last exposé was regarding Blackwater, the outsourced corporation that provides security in Iraq and elsewhere, and has less accountability to the U.S. government. What was the backlash to your investigation, especially since Jay Leno asked if your life was in danger [on ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’] because of it?

Scahill: That is the number one question that comes up at Q&A’s for the film, ‘what was I thinking when Jay Leno asked me that?’ What I actually was thinking was, ‘F**k, my Mom is watching.’ [laughs] What is she going to think?

All reporters who do this kind of work is under some kind of pressure. I get detained every time I come back to the U.S., and I don’t blame them, because my passport says Somalia, Yemen and the like. I get pulled aside for ‘informative discussions’ with authorities all the time. My computer has been hacked, I get hostile emails, but I also know journalists that are in prisons right now. So when people tell me that I’m brave, or aren’t you nervous or afraid, I feel a bit embarrassed, because I know truly brave journalists, who don’t come back to where I live at Park Slope, Brooklyn, the land of baby strollers and lattes. Those guys are living in war zones. We’re living in a time of whistleblowers being prosecuted, journalists being targeted and an intensification of covert wars. The stakes are high now.

HollywoodChicago.com: Finally, what will be the next chapter of ‘Dirty Wars,’ especially if the more hawkish Republicans come back to executive power?

Scahill: If you look at President Obama’s speech recently at the National Defense University, I almost felt like Senator Obama was debating President Obama in that speech. This is a guy that realizes that it has gotten out of control, but the same time he is president and he has bought into this as a policy. Even though he says we can’t have perpetual war, he is building a mechanism for it to endure.

The next time a Republican comes into office, liberals will have very shaky ground to stand on to confront this, because of the support of their guy in office. You ask what the next chapter is? If there is a Republican that comes into the presidency, we’re not only going to see a continuation of the past 13 years of Bush to Obama, but we’re going to see an expansion of the programs.

HollywoodChicago.com: Is that the legacy of Obama’s foreign policy?

Scahill: On a counter-terrorism level, Obama’s legacy is that he cleaned it up for Republicans. Somewhere the neo-conservatives are thinking, ‘thank God Obama got elected and not John McCain, because he saved the day for United States militarism.’

“Dirty Wars” expanded its limited release in Chicago on June 14th. See local listings for show times and theaters. Written by Jeremy Scahill and David Riker. Directed by Rick Rowley. Not Rated.

HollywoodChicago.com senior staff writer Patrick McDonald

By PATRICK McDONALD
Senior Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
pat@hollywoodchicago.com

© 2013 Patrick McDonald, HollywoodChicago.com

Anonymous's picture

love him

Jeremy Scahill is right on. Liberal need to wake up.

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