Dirty little wars

http://youtu.be/53zLkeIXZvg

Amy Goodman:

As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film’s director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill.

The increasing pace of US drone strikes, and the Obama administration’s reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a US press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama’s new bangs. Dirty Wars, along with Scahill’sforthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence … with a bang that matters.

Scahill and Rowley, no strangers to war zones, ventured beyond Kabul,Afghanistan, south to Gardez, in Paktia province, a region dense with armed Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, to investigate one of the thousands of night raids that typically go unreported. Scahill told me:

“In Gardez, US special operations forces had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and … Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the US.”

Scahill and Rowley went to the heart of the story, to hear from people who live at the target end of US foreign policy. In Gardez, they interviewed survivors of that violent raid on the night of 12 February 2010. After watching his brother and his wife, his sister and his niece killed by US special forces, Mohammed Sabir was handcuffed on the ground. He watched, helpless, as the US soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife’s corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown off by helicopter to another province.