Dirty wars by Jeremy schahill is recommended to give an alternate view point to the ongoing war on terror. When ever US forces carry out a raid we are told that 4-5 militants were killed. In many cases they are killing innocent people. This movie is based in Afghanistan but we can relate to it through drone strikes and other covert operations in Pakistan.
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What is the alternative? Wasn't it the army that eagerly approved of the drone strike that killed Nek Muhammad?
The problem is that no one has any other alternatives. People get all giddy with sovereignty, ghairat, collateral damage, but we, as a people, have no idea how to deal with the law & order problem called ASWJ, Taliban, AQ etc. If we can have operations in balochistan, Karachi with ranger AND FC (paramilitary) then why can't southern Punjab be fixed or north Waziristan be flushed out? It is like banging one's head against the wall here as I don't think that people even agree on the law & order issue on this site.
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What is the alternative? Wasn't it the army that eagerly approved of the drone strike that killed Nek Muhammad?
The problem is that no one has any other alternatives. People get all giddy with sovereignty, ghairat, collateral damage, but we, as a people, have no idea how to deal with the law & order problem called ASWJ, Taliban, AQ etc. If we can have operations in balochistan, Karachi with ranger AND FC (paramilitary) then why can't southern Punjab be fixed or north Waziristan be flushed out? It is like banging one's head against the wall here as I don't think that people even agree on the law & order issue on this site.
As if there had been no military operations in Waziristaan? Really?
What good has military operation achieved in Balouchistaan, Karachi (referring to 90s here)? What makes people think just because they oppose military operationsing one place they simultaneously support military operations everywhere else?
In civilised countries, you don't need firing tanks and troops on the street to maintain law and order. Hang world famous croocks like Zardari, Sharif, get all those looted billions back in the country and invest it in creating a sophisticated and well trained police force and elite anti terrorism forces. Increase their numbers, resources and training.
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I am talking about north waziristan. Rangers are part military so the current operation in Karachi is semi military in nature.
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^ DO you think an operation in NWA would solve our taleban problem?
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In that case, why have Police at all? We should kick out Rangers from Karachi as well since their most recent operation certainly hasn't resulted in 0 target killings.
Someone on the run would make mistakes and could be caught by police and I think that it would preferable to ceding space to Taliban to have an HQ there. See, the thing is that the game is bigger than Pakistan and sadly, or perhaps Pakistanis deserve this for being stupid, these Pakistanis are the last thing on the mind of the policymakers.
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In that case, why have Police at all? We should kick out Rangers from Karachi as well since their most recent operation certainly hasn't resulted in 0 target killings.
Someone on the run would make mistakes and could be caught by police and I think that it would preferable to ceding space to Taliban to have an HQ there. See, the thing is that the game is bigger than Pakistan and sadly, or perhaps Pakistanis deserve this for being stupid, these Pakistanis are the last thing on the mind of the policymakers.
Taliban already has a presence in Karachi, a big one that.
As far as operations in NWA is concerned, the government should announce it if they think it would solve our terrorism problem. The previous operations have only pushed Taliban deeper into Pakistan and across the borders in Afghanistan (Kunar/Niristan etc). Any operations in NWA will push the taliban into Khost, Paktia and Paktika. They already have a support structure there. Will that solve the problem? I dont think so.
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Some might have escaped to Afghanistan, but the rest have escaped to North Waziristan. If PAF can take on Afghanistan in the sixties then it should man up and do something or perhaps it can be done some other way?
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Ok, how do I watch the entire documentary without paying the £ 80?
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Ok, how do I watch the entire documentary without paying the £ 80?
80 Euros? I think you can buy it for 20 bucks or rent it for a week for 13.
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absolutely a gem of a documentary.. i have watched it twice... this man jeremy scahill has more humanity that most pakistanis today..
THIS GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR IS A LIE .. JUST LIKE THE LIE OF 911.. N EVERY BATTLE BEING FOUGHT ANYWHERE IN THE WHOLE WORLD IS A BIG LIE.. THEY KILL INDISCRIMINATELY AND CALL THE DEAD TERRORISTS OR AQ OR TALIB.. EACH N EVERY PERSON WHO HAS BEEN KILLED IN THE NAME OF GWOT SINCE 2001 HAS BEEN MURDERED UNJUSTLY..
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I have watched a part of the documentary. Jeremy Scahill has investigated some attacks that have taken place in Afghanistan (the deadly night raids) in which many ordinary people have been killed (pregnant women and children).
In Gardez, a policeman and two pregnant women were killed, marriage ceremonies were attacked and the announcements from the Americans were as expected (x number of militants killed). NATO tried to discredit the journalist who exposed Gardez. These raids are being conducted by JSOC unit which is reporting directly to the US president. About 1700 of these raids were carried out in a period of three months.
He also went to Yemen to check on five missile attacks killing more than 100 people. Yemeni government took responsibility for the same, claiming that they had attacked Alqaeda’s training camp (in Al Majala). Again the people killed were ordinary people, the journalist who exposed this was thrown into prison by the authorities. The US footprint on the attack was very obvious (missile shells) but still the US has not expected responsibility for the same. This war has a lot that’s hidden from the naked eye.
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Some afghans in this video were calling jsoc guys as bearded American taleban.
JSoc: Obama’s secret assassins | Naomi Wolf | Comment is free | theguardian.com
The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global “war on terror”. It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation’s contemporary history.
Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding “kill lists”. It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.
Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the “kill lists” they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.
**Our conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear chain of command. As much as the US military may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness compared with JSoc, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes.
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**JSoc morphs the secretive, unaccountable mercenary model of private military contracting, which Scahill identified in Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, into a hybrid with the firepower and intelligence backup of our full state resources. The Hill reports that JSoc is now seeking more “flexibility” to expand its operations globally.
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JSoc operates outside the traditional chain of command; it reports directly to the president of the United States. In the words of Wired magazine:
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“JSoc operates with practically no accountability.”
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**Scahill calls JSoc the president’s “paramilitary”. Its budget, which may be in the billions, is secret.
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What does it means for the president to have an unaccountable paramilitary force, which can assassinate anyone anywhere in the world? JSoc has already been sent to kill at least one US citizen – one who had been indicted for no crime, but was condemned for propagandizing for al-Qaida. Anwar al-Awlaki, on JSoc’s “kill list” since 2010, was killed by CIA-controlled drone attack in September 2011; his teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki – also a US citizen – was killed by a US drone two weeks later.
**This arrangement – where death squads roam under the sole control of the executive – is one definition of dictatorship. It now has the potential to threaten critics of the US anywhere in the world.
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The film reveals some of these dangers: Scahill, writing in the Nation, reported that President Obama called Yemen’s President Saleh in 2011 to express “concern” about jailed reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye. US spokespeople have confirmed the US interest in keeping him in prison.
**Shaye, a Yemeni journalist based in Sana’a, had a reputation for independent journalism through his neutral interviewing of al-Qaida operatives, and of critics of US policy such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Journalist colleagues in Yemen dismiss the notion of any terrorist affiliation: Shaye had worked for the Washington Post, ABC news, al-Jazeera, and other major media outlets.
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**Shaye went to al-Majala in Yemen, where a missile strike had killed a group that the US had called “al-Qaida”. “What he discovered,” reports Scahill, “were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs … some of them bearing the label ‘Made in the USA’, and distributed the photos to international media outlets.”
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**Fourteen women and 21 children were killed. “Whether anyone actually active in al-Qaida was killed remains hotly contested.” Shortly afterwards, Shaye was kidnapped and beaten by Yemeni security forces. In a trial that was criticized internationally by reporters’ groups and human rights organizations, he was accused of terrorism. Shaye is currently serving a five-year sentence.
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Scahill and Rowley got to the bars of Shaye’s cell to interview him, before the camera goes dark (in almost every scene, they put their lives at risk). This might also bring to mind the fates of Sami al-Haj of al-Jazeera, also kidnapped, and sent to Guantánamo, and of Julian Assange, trapped in asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.
President Obama thus helped put a respected reporter in prison for reporting critically on JSoc’s activities. The most disturbing issue of all, however, is the documentation of the “secret laws” now facilitating these abuses of American power: Scahill succeeds in getting Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the Senate intelligence committee, to confirm the fact that there are secret legal opinions governing the use of drones in targeted assassinations that, he says, Americans would be “very surprised” to know about. This is not the first time Wyden has issued this warning.
In 2011, Wyden sought an amendment to the USA Patriot Act titled requiring the US government “to end practice of secretly interpreting law”. Wyden warns that there is now a system of law beneath or behind the law that we can see and debate:
"It is impossible for Congress to hold an informed public debate on the Patriot Act when there is a significant gap between what most Americans believe the law says and what the government is using the law to do. In fact, I believe many members of Congress who have voted on this issue would be stunned to know how the Patriot Act is being interpreted and applied.
“Even secret operations need to be conducted within the bounds of established, publicly understood law. Any time there is a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the government secretly thinks the law says, I believe you have a serious problem.”
I have often wondered, since (Fascist America, in 10 easy steps | Naomi Wolf | The Guardian), what was driving it. I saw the symptoms but not the cause. Scahill’s and Rowley’s brave, transformational film reveals the prime movers at work. The US executive now has a network of secret laws, secret budgets, secret kill lists, and a well-funded, globally deployed army of secret teams of assassins. That is precisely the driving force working behind what we can see. Is fascism really too strong a word to describe it?
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Iraqis, at least the shiites and the indifferent Kurds, were eager to kick the americans out, so why did the loya jirga approved the BSA that Karzai is dily dallying to sign now? Has the umm Law of Relativity when it comes to taliban attacks allows americans / nato to get away with smaller incidents?
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As far as Anwar Awlaki is concerned, Jeremy says he was shocked to see an American sentenced to death without any conviction. His father had lodged a case to ask the US government share the evidence against Awlaki, but the government refused to share that as it was very sensitive. There was no concrete evidence against him.
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Isn't Treason punishable by death?
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The secret kill list is increasing, after 911 there were 7 people on the list, after Iraq there were 55, after Afghanistan there were thousands and now there's no count (signature killings). Covert operations are being carried out in 70 countries, Indonesia, Philippines, Somalia etc. The covert war in Somalia has destroyed the country, half of it is being ruled by Al Shabab and the remaining half by mercenaries (war lords) who have an endless kill list.
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Isn't Treason punishable by death?
No conviction, which is the main point.