Hidden in plain sight
Daniel Nelson
The camera shoots in black and white through the windscreen of a moving car. A bearded face at the wheel. A voice intones: “Kabul, Afghanistan, 4 in the morning.
“As an American journalist I was used to filing stories in the middle of the night. But there’s always something eerie driving through the deserted streets.
“A city of 3 million, barely a street light on.”
Dirty Wars starts like a film noir. And it gets more melodramatic: “This is a story about the seen – and the unseen, and about things hidden in plain sight.”
Some viewers will dislike Jeremy Scahill’s approach, the heroic loner, putting himself at the centre of the story, seeing himself as part of the story, a warrior journalist, driving boldly into dangerous places, probing secrets that authorities don’t want told.
But let’s hear it for Scahill: he IS brave, he DOES venture out when others stay in secure places reporting officially mediated news, he DOES track down secrets. Yes, he fronts the film when the issues are far, far wider than the enterprise of any one individual, but the personalised approach adds a touch of drama and will help get the film seen. Yes, perhaps he is vain – I don’t know, I’ve never met him – but he has reason to be proud of what he’s done.
It starts when he leaves the relative safety of Kabul to interview survivors of an attack on a village: “A night raid, four Taliban killed, no civilians injured”, according to the NATO news release. No names, no details.
The witnesses tell a different, more personal, more harrowing story. And there is some evidence to prove the accuracy of their account.
Scahill checks, searches, asks questions, probes. Western officials bluster, change their stories. Gradually he builds up a picture of the almost unknown US Joint Special Operations Command, quietly assuming control of war being waged around the world.
“We call them the American Taliban,” says a villager.
Through this special op organisation, says Scahill, “the US has fundamentally changed the way it fights war.” And he says the decision was made by President Obama.
Scahill’s questions take him to Washington, Somalia and to Yemen, where for him the uncoiling story takes on a new dimension: the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a moderate-turned-militant who was a US citizen: “I was investigating the assassination of a US citizen – a watershed event.”
This carries the story forward, which is lucky because during the making of this documentary the Joint Special Operations Command came out of the shadows with the killing of Osama bin Laden and into public view. As Scahill says, however, “JSOC may no longer have been a secret, but that didn’t mean we now knew the truth.”
And so it continues, the terse monologue voice-overs, the pixillated interviews, the huge claims about a global killing machine.
As I say, you may not like the tone but it’s worth watching, to get a glimpse of a hidden world, a sense of superpower ruthlessness, and a suggestion that it all might prove dangerously counterproductive.
· Dirty Wars Image by Dirty Wars
Dirty Wars
