Index
The World Is a Battlefield:
Jeremy Scahill on "Dirty Wars" and Obama’s Expanding Drone Attacks
Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation magazine, Democracy Now! correspondent and author of the
new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. He produced the award-winning documentary film with the same name with
Richard Rowley. He is also the author of the bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Jeremy Scahill: I called it Dirty Wars because, you know, particularly in this administration, in the Obama administration,
I think a lot of people are being led to believe that there’s—there is a such thing as a clean war and that the drone and what’s called
targeted killing—I mean, I use that term myself, but it’s actually not—if you think about it, it’s actually not a very appropriate term
for what’s going on, because it’s—as we know, these strikes are anything but targeted, in many cases, and we don’t know the—we
don’t even know the identities of many of the people that we’re killing in intentional strikes.
So, I called it Dirty Wars because there is no such thing as a clean war, and drone warfare is not clean, but also as a sort of allusion to
how we’ve returned to the kind of 1980s way of waging war, where the U.S. was involved in all these dirty wars in Central and Latin
America, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and beyond. And we’re using—you know, we’re in a world right now where the U.S. is using
proxies, that effectively are death squads, in Somalia to hunt down people that the U.S. has determined are enemies. We’re using mercenaries.
President Obama continues to use mercenary forces in various wars, declared and undeclared, around the world. You also have the
aiding of dictatorships and other, you know, right-wing governments around the world and propping them up. It’s very similar to
what Reagan and company were doing in Central America. And you have an increasingly paramilitarized CIA. You know, the CIA served a
major paramilitary function for many decades at the beginning, from the 1950s through the 1970s.
And then, because of the scandals of assassinations and the Church Committee hearings and the House Committee on Political
Assassinations, you had a generation of CIA people that came up sort of feeling like, "Wow, covert action—we should be careful
about getting into this business." After 9/11, the CIA has been on a constant sort of curve back to paramilitarization. So you
have the CIA functioning as a paramilitary organization, and JSOC has become very, very powerful.
etcetera..................
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/24/the_world_is_a_battlefield_jeremy
Jeremy Scahill on "Dirty Wars" and Obama’s Expanding Drone Attacks
Jeremy Scahill, national security correspondent for The Nation magazine, Democracy Now! correspondent and author of the
new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. He produced the award-winning documentary film with the same name with
Richard Rowley. He is also the author of the bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
Jeremy Scahill: I called it Dirty Wars because, you know, particularly in this administration, in the Obama administration,
I think a lot of people are being led to believe that there’s—there is a such thing as a clean war and that the drone and what’s called
targeted killing—I mean, I use that term myself, but it’s actually not—if you think about it, it’s actually not a very appropriate term
for what’s going on, because it’s—as we know, these strikes are anything but targeted, in many cases, and we don’t know the—we
don’t even know the identities of many of the people that we’re killing in intentional strikes.
So, I called it Dirty Wars because there is no such thing as a clean war, and drone warfare is not clean, but also as a sort of allusion to
how we’ve returned to the kind of 1980s way of waging war, where the U.S. was involved in all these dirty wars in Central and Latin
America, in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and beyond. And we’re using—you know, we’re in a world right now where the U.S. is using
proxies, that effectively are death squads, in Somalia to hunt down people that the U.S. has determined are enemies. We’re using mercenaries.
President Obama continues to use mercenary forces in various wars, declared and undeclared, around the world. You also have the
aiding of dictatorships and other, you know, right-wing governments around the world and propping them up. It’s very similar to
what Reagan and company were doing in Central America. And you have an increasingly paramilitarized CIA. You know, the CIA served a
major paramilitary function for many decades at the beginning, from the 1950s through the 1970s.
And then, because of the scandals of assassinations and the Church Committee hearings and the House Committee on Political
Assassinations, you had a generation of CIA people that came up sort of feeling like, "Wow, covert action—we should be careful
about getting into this business." After 9/11, the CIA has been on a constant sort of curve back to paramilitarization. So you
have the CIA functioning as a paramilitary organization, and JSOC has become very, very powerful.
etcetera..................
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/24/the_world_is_a_battlefield_jeremy
