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Dirty Wars (Richard Rowley, 2013)

Posted: Sun Jun 02, 2013 2:57 pm
by Donald Brown
From the site for the film and the book from which it's drawn:
Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, into the heart of America’s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond.

Part political thriller and part detective story, Dirty Wars is a gripping journey into one of the most important and underreported stories of our time.

What begins as a report into a U.S. night raid gone terribly wrong in a remote corner of Afghanistan quickly turns into a global investigation of the secretive and powerful Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Scahill digs deeper into the activities of JSOC, he is pulled into a world of covert operations unknown to the public and carried out across the globe by men who do not exist on paper and will never appear before Congress. In military jargon, JSOC teams “find, fix, and finish” their targets, who are selected through a secret process. No target is off limits for the “kill list,” including U.S. citizens.

Drawn into the stories and lives of the people he meets along the way, Scahill is forced to confront the painful consequences of a war spinning out of control, as well as his own role as a journalist.

We encounter two parallel casts of characters.

The CIA agents, Special Forces operators, military generals, and U.S.-backed warlords who populate the dark side of American wars go on camera and on the record, some for the first time.

We also see and hear directly from survivors of night raids and drone strikes, including the family of the first American citizen marked for death and being hunted by his own government.
An interview with Scahill here.

His reportage on the wars in the Middle East has been exhaustive and revelatary. Looking forward to this.

Re: Dirty Wars (Richard Rowley, 2013)

Posted: Sun Jun 02, 2013 6:13 pm
by Lowry_Sam
Really good coverage of J. Scahill can be found on Democracy Now, where he got his start reporting.

Re: Dirty Wars (Richard Rowley, 2013)

Posted: Sat Jun 15, 2013 11:14 pm
by warren oates
A resounding meh for me on this one. And I say that as a follower and sometimes admirer of Scahill's print journalism. But anyone who's been remotely paying attention to his writing and others' for the last decade won't find much that's newsworthy or insightful in this film. There are about 25 minutes of good footage stretched out to feature length. It's more of a travelogue/essay film/agitprop piece. The whole thing felt rather dumbed down to me, preaching to the choir politically and connecting the dots with an ersatz personal narrative (largely in voice-over) that's at best disingenuous and at worst wholly fabricated. For instance, Scahill asserts that he's shocked, shocked to discover in the mid aughts that something like JSOC, which he says he's never before heard of, exists. Or that they've been operating in places like Somalia, the Philippines, Jordan and Latin American -- all places they've been previously reported to be, sometimes by the likes of superstar journalists like Mark Bowden. The best bits are his trip to the site of a failed American "night raid" in Gardez and his clandestine interviews of what looks to be an American tier one operator who's disillusioned with his command's imperial overreach. Unfortunately, the latter scenes only scratch the surface. Definitely the least interesting documentary about these issues I've seen this year. You'd be better off reading his books and articles or watching Manhunt, The Gatekeepers or some Frontline episodes instead.

Re: Dirty Wars (Richard Rowley, 2013)

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 5:51 am
by Luke M
I was lucky enough to attend a showing at the IFC center with a Q&A afterwards with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and Jeremy Scahill. After the showing, I met Scahill and got a copy of "Dirty Wars" signed. Very cool guy.

I'm about a third through the book and really enjoying it. I can't say the same for the movie. The movie had a number of scenes that just didn't deliver that emotional punches like it wanted. It felt like it was trying too hard to land them too. As warren oates said, read the book.