Dirty Wars journalist Jeremy Scahill takes aim at U.S. secrecy

As the national security correspondent for The Nation, Jeremy Scahill has posed some challenging questions about how the United States should conduct itself during wartime. His 2007 book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, recounts how the company became a major player in the war in Iraq while removing layers of public accountability.

Scahill’s latest book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, examines how targeted assassinations, particularly drone strikes, may have become counterproductive. It follows the history of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the intelligence and military network behind part of the drone program. He pays particular attention to residents of a compound in Afghanistan, and to Yemen, where the radical U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son were targeted for assassination.

Scahill is the subject of Richard Rowley’s new documentary, Dirty Wars, which opens Friday at Tivoli Cinemas. The film follows Scahill as he covers these stories, and it shows us that the work is grim and troubling. (The film won the Cinematography Award: U.S. Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.) The Pitch spoke with him this month by phone.

The Pitch: What makes a drone strike more ominous than sending a SEAL team into a place?

Scahill: To me, the issue is not the [drone] technology as much as it is the principle upon which these strikes are being authorized — that the U.S. is asserting, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, that it has the right to conduct what are assassination operations in any country it pleases around the world.

I think that part of the drone issue is that they’re spooky. You’ve got guys sitting in trailers in the Southwest United States that are essentially bombing Pakistan or Yemen. And then they get into their cars at the end of the day. As they get off of their base, they pass a sign that says: “Buckle up. This is the most dangerous part of your day.” Meaning they have a greater likelihood of being killed in a traffic accident than they do in the war that they’re helping to fight.

I also think that the domestic concerns about drones, combined with how we’ve seen them used internationally, and the fact that the Tea Party folks like [U.S. Sen.] Rand Paul and others have raised a ruckus about it and the idea that drones could be used on U.S. soil, have all tapped into people’s greatest fears about a national security state.

I have tried to caution people that if you focus too much about one weapon, you’re doing so at the expense of missing all the other trees in the forest. I think that all of that taps into people’s greatest fears of robotic warfare and of dudes in trailers somewhere piloting drones.

Unlike some of the pundits who dismiss your findings, you’ve actually been to Afghanistan and Iraq to see for yourself what has happened.

I’ll tell you something sort of funny. When Bush and Cheney were in power, and I was covering Blackwater and the war in Iraq, talking about human-rights abuses and torture and mass killings, I would get a lot of e-mails praising me from liberals. “Oh, thank you for exposing this.” “We need to hold these guys accountable.” “This can’t happen.” “This is America.” “This is against our values.” And then Obama becomes president, and then my inbox flips around. I have liberals telling me how much they despise me and how I’m undermining the president. “What do you want? For Mitt Romney to be president?” And all I’m doing is the same sort of basic reporting.

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I think that a lot of liberals in particular have sort of coat-checked their conscience during the two terms of the Obama party. And, to me, it calls into question if these are principles in play, because you were against these things when Bush was doing it and now you seem to support it when Obama’s doing it, or you’re silent in the face of him doing many of the same things Bush and Cheney were doing.

And I also empathize with some of these people. Look at all these racist, bigoted attacks on the president, coming from the craziest corners of the right wing. It’s not like the guy isn’t under siege. His citizenship has been called into question. They portray him as a sort of bizarre, Marxist Manchurian candidate and not a real American.

I also think the president has been very effective in convincing people that this is a smarter, more effective way of waging war against people who are plotting against the United States. There’s been a portrayal of this as surgical and not so many civilians have died, and you don’t subject American forces to being killed or maimed on the battlefield. I think a lot of people have bought into that idea.

I just disagree that that’s the reality. I disagree not based on being embedded on my couch but going in and talking to people in areas that are being targeted. I think we’ve killed a tremendous number of innocent people, and in some places, our policies are making more enemies than they are killing terrorists.

In the film, you document the deaths of an Afghan policeman and two women who lived in the same house. It was obvious that they weren’t Taliban.

I’ll tell you something about that family. We originally had a line in the film explaining how these guys weren’t ethnic Pashtuns, meaning they were not the almost exclusive ethnicity of the Taliban. The women were not wearing burqas. These guys had a proven record of fighting against the Taliban. They were a minority in a very Taliban part of Afghanistan, and I write all of this in the book.

When you know these details, it makes it [the strike] even more egregious. So let me get this straight: The Americans went into this place and they gunned these people down. And it turned out it was one of their allies, a guy who was on the Taliban’s death list, we killed there? One of the Afghans who was actually collaborating with us? Which is why, when the guy [a relative of the victims] said, “I wanted to put on a suicide vest and blow myself up among the Americans,” it’s so profound because this was a very pro-American family. And we lost them. The male members of this family wanted to kill Americans in retaliation.

At the same time, the film shows that Anwar al-Awlaki’s father, Nasser al-Awlaki, despite losing a son and a grandson to drone strikes, is still not denouncing America.

This guy [Anwar] was not his only son. One of his children is a beekeeper. One is a schoolteacher. The other works for an international oil company. They’re all modern, sort of Western-oriented folks. Anwar al-Awlaki, for reasons we try to get into in the film, became radicalized, I think in a large part because of American foreign policy. To this day, they are still based in the United States.

This is a guy who went to the United States in 1966 as a Fulbright Scholar and wanted to raise his children in the spirit of sort of American culture and values. I’m always in awe of people who let us come in and talk with them and share their stories. Look, he’s fighting in the court system still in the U.S. to try to get answers, particularly as to why his grandson was killed. And, in part, it’s because he has faith that if the American people were to look at all the facts, they would give an honest assessment. That’s pretty profound that he still believes that.

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In the book and the film, you present a nuanced picture of Anwar al-Awlaki. Two of the 9/11 hijackers briefly attended his mosque. But say a Catholic priest performed a mass, and Timothy McVeigh once attended that mass in his parish. Would they do the same to him?

I never heard somebody put it that way. I wish I had talked with you before I started writing the book. That would have been a good example to give.

I’m willing, for the sake of debate, to concede that Awlaki is guilty of everything that the president and his advisers have leaked to the media and have now publicly said about him. To me, the question is, what do we do with a [U.S.] citizen like that, who is a reprehensible individual? It’s more about who we are as a society than who Awlaki was. My biggest problem has always been why the secrecy in it. Why not just say, “This is a man who did XYZ. Here’s the evidence against him. We’re going to indict him, and if Yemen doesn’t hand him over, then we’re going to take our own action against him to bring him to justice.”

But none of that happened. We basically fast-forwarded past the indictment phase, the trial phase and the verdict phase, and just went right into the sentencing phase with him where he’s sentenced to death. I don’t think that he was a noble man at all. And he may well have been guilty of all sorts of things. But how we are going to treat someone like that is relevant to all Americans.