"DIRTY WARS" WILL MAKE YOU BURN

By Chuck Graham, TucsonStage.com

 

Adding more fuel to the incendiary flame of disgust over the U.S. government’s respect for its own citizens is the documentary “Dirty Wars,” now playing at the Loft Cinema, 3233 E. Speedway Blvd.

This candid inside-Afghanistan film will outrage conservatives as well as liberals who consider themselves true believers in the American way of life.

Career war correspondent Jeremy Scahill (presently on the staff of The Nation magazine), has written and directed this account of his own reporting on how the military wiped out an (apparently) innocent Afghan family misidentified as Taliban.

Doing the reporting on this unfortunate hit squad commanded by American officers, Scahill found out about the global (undeclared) wars being waged secretly by our military’s Joint Special Operations Command in a number of nations. All who ostensibly have peaceful relations with the United States.

Hiding behind a smokescreen of justification called The War on Terror, President Obama has approved the tactics of this JSOC to pursue and eliminate individuals deemed dangerous to the United States.

Scahill was there when the New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim Yemeni-American imam, was assassinated in Yemen by a CIA-led drone strike. Was he a traitor? Should a proper trial determine that? Or was it just fine to shoot first and ask questions later?

The dangerous part – that part that makes “Dirty Wars” so important – is that we the people don’t get to decide the answers to those questions. The politicians presently in power are the ones making all the decisions now.

“Dirty Wars” the film is a companion piece to Scahill’s book “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield” which should be on the reading list of everyone concerned about the future of our country.

Since independent investigations such as this have been abandoned for the most part by the country’s large newspapers and television networks, our informed citizenry must look to these lone wolf enterprises to bring us as much truth as we are going to get about what’s really going on behind that that smokescreen called the War on Terror.