Jeremy Scahill:

Jeremy Scahill, an investigative foreign correspondent whose first documentary, “Dirty Wars,” opens Friday, writes for The Nation and achieved his biggest success with “Blackwater,” a best-selling book critiquing security contractors hired by the George W. Bush administration. Neither of which keeps him from being labeled a right-wing stooge by detractors.

“Most of my hate mail nowadays comes from liberals, not conservatives,” he said.

This is because Mr. Scahill has also been an outspoken critic of President Obama. Specifically, he disapproves of what he describes as the administration’s efforts to “normalize and legitimize” targeted assassinations — drone-executed and otherwise — Special Operations raids and other covert military practices that blur the battle lines of the war on terrorism.

“Dirty Wars” is his latest salvo. In the film (his book with the same title came out in April), Mr. Scahill investigates several American strikes that killed civilians with no apparent ties to terrorist groups, beginning with a February 2010 raid in the village of Khatabeh, Afghanistan, that killed several members of a family. An Afghan police chief and three women were among the dead. (The United States first denied and then acknowledged its role in the deaths.)

Along the way Mr. Scahill suggests that such acts are radicalizing Muslims both obscure — a man in Khatabeh talks about wanting to become a suicide bomber — and well-known, like the American cleric-turned-Qaeda firebrand Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by drones in September 2011. “We are encouraging a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Mr. Scahill said. “We are making more new enemies than we are killing actual terrorists.”

Mr. Scahill, 38, has been a frequent talking head on cable news shows and recently was awarded a $150,000 Windham Campbell literary prize. The film stands to raise his profile as it mixes disturbing events in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia with Mr. Scahill’s raw emotional responses.

He said he had resisted a prominent on-camera role, but allowed that the approach humanizes the film and builds credibility with viewers by being transparent about the imperfect art of journalism. Intense but friendly in conversation, with striking blue eyes, Mr. Scahill talked to Jeremy Egner about how making the film altered him. These are excerpts from the interview.

Q. How did this project begin?

A. There was this war within the war in Afghanistan. There was the conventional war — the Marines in Helmand Province — and then you had these night raids. But I didn’t know much about it. We started filming aftermaths of night raids and interviewing people.

How did it evolve?

I was going to be more of a tour guide to this archipelago of undeclared wars. As we started talking about how we wanted to tell the story, we realized we didn’t really have a story. We had four or five ministories, but we weren’t really doing an effective job of connecting them. David [Riker, the co-writer] said: “You’re burying a big part of the story, which is that this film has really changed you as a person. You’re not some dispassionate observer.”

How were you changed by it?

I feel gutted as a person, to be really honest. When you do this kind of work you run from one story to the next and you try not to let anything catch up with you. Once we started doing this as a more personal journey, it was like a floodgate opened of all of the horrifying stuff that I’ve seen and the stories I’ve absorbed. I was forced to confront things that I don’t think I wanted to.
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What do you hope viewers take away from this?

I don’t have any illusions about Congress changing things, but I have faith in people. If we debate about this in our society, Congress will be forced to do something about it. If we embrace assassination as a central component of our foreign policy and continue with the mentality that we can kill our way to victory — or worse, kill our way to peace — then we’re whistling past the graveyard.