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telling stories of secret US military warfare that the film fo- ual devices born in Hollywood that are becoming more and Take me cuses on: Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. more common in contemporary documentaries. All three are tales of black ops, where the US military The opening sequence could have come out of the to the front played a central role in acts of war against civilians, by Bourne series. The post-production grading of the video committing them or, in the case of Somalia, facilitating creates an effect audiences will recognize as a kind of half- them. As Scahill says, in the opening montage, “This is a way house between entertainment and documentaries. Call Richard Gizbert story about the seen and the unseen. And about things hid- it cinéma (slightly less) verité. den in plain sight.” The narrative winds through dusty roads in the Mid- In the documentary Dirty Wars (directed It seems rather easy nowadays, given what has hap- dle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa, pauses for by Rick Rowley) Jeremy Scahill shines a pened to the news industry, to hide such things. Jingo- breath at the reporter’s apartment in Brooklyn and fol- ism still mars a lot of the coverage of foreign policy coming lows Scahill into a congressional committee room in Wash- light into the darkness of America’s secret out of the US. Despite the mea culpas (or kinda culpas) we ington, DC. There, his shocking findings on an American wars, and on the culture of apathy and heard after all those anchor people helped cheerlead Amer- war crime are presented to a half-empty committee room ignorance that enables it. ica, indefensibly, into Iraq, they are basically singing from that just grows more empty as Scahill delivers his evidence. the same song sheet on Iran. One of the narrative threads the film relies on And with the economics of the news industry collapsing is Scahill himself, and he is uncomfortably prominent Dans le documentaire Dirty Wars de Rick budgets and Justin Bieber running amok and attracting those in the presentation of the film. “Uncomfortable” is his Rowley, Jeremy Scahill fait la lumière sur les coveted clicks, what sensible North American news outlet word, not mine. He told me in an interview that he had sombres guerres secrètes de l’Amérique. Et would devote its dwindling resources to chasing stories from to be convinced to front the story for marketing purposes. sur la culture d’ignorance et d’apathie qui which most North Americans would rather avert their eyes? Scahill despairs at that uncomfortable truth: that the best chance his documentary had to succeed with mostly white, les rend possibles. irty Wars gets at those stories through a combination Western audiences would be if he presented it, rather than Dof dogged journalism, thousands of miles travelled, allowing the participants — and victims — of the story to exceptional access and good storytelling, as well as the vis- tell it themselves.
uring the national anthem at the recent Super Drones are the weapons of choice in more and more Bowl, the television audience got the now cus- conflicts these days. This is because they are the perfect Dtomary military component of the pregame pres- tool to fight the new kind of war, the asymmetrical con- entation: an Army colour guard on the field, live images of flicts that confound conventional armies. They also usually troops saluting from some base in Afghanistan followed by confound modern news outlets, which haven’t yet learned the customary fly-by, the strutting of overhead weaponry how to cover them. 1/2 page horizontal that Americans somehow find reassuring. These are the kind of conflicts Jeremy Scahill covers This year’s fly-by, however, was different. No jets. In- in Dirty Wars, the timely documentary that goes where stead, we got Apache helicopters, which makes sense when much of the Western world’s news media does not and tells QUEENS you think about it. Given what the US military seems to be important stories that usually go untold. up to around the world these days, it’s not really about jets. Getting into the shadowy areas around modern warfare It’s about close air support. is not easy. Doing it with a video camera is harder. And What would have made even more sense would have turning it into a watchable, Academy Award-nominated been a fly-by of drones. The skies over the stadium in documentary is harder still. New Jersey should have been filled with pilotless Preda- Scahill made his name and learned his way around the tors and Reapers. And the video feed shouldn’t have come nooks and crannies in and around the US military when he
from Bagram. It should have been from a secret location in wrote Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mer- 1 0 0 Nevada or upstate New York, at one of the many military cenary Army, his 2008 book on the giant military contract- bases where pilots do their remote control thing. ing firm that made billions during the American invasion 9 5 and occupation of Iraq. Like drones, Blackwater does most of its work in the 7 5 dark, off screen (and off the books, as far as Pentagon spending is officially concerned). Scahill’s reporting on
Richard Gizbert hosts Listening Post, on Al Jazeera English. Blackwater prepared him well for Dirty Wars and the three 2 5