About the Book
In this groundbreaking book of new reportage, sure to stir a global debate, journalist Jeremy Scahill--author of the acclaimed international bestseller Blackwater--takes us into the heart of the War on Terror's most dangerous battlefields as he chases down the most important foreign policy story of our time.
From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond, Scahill speaks to the CIA agents, mercenaries, and elite Special Operations Forces operators who populate the dark side of American war-fighting. He goes deep into al-Qaeda-held territory in Yemen and walks the streets of Mogadishu with CIA-backed warlords. We also meet the survivors of US night raids and drone strikes--including families of US citizens targeted for assassination by their own government--who reveal the human consequences of the dirty wars the United States struggles to keep hidden.
Written in a gripping, action-packed narrative nonfiction style, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield reveals that, despite his pledge to bring accountability to US wars and to end Bush-era abuses, President Barack Obama has kept in place many of the most dangerous and secret programs that thrived under his predecessor. In stunning detail, Scahill exposes how Obama has escalated these secret US wars and has built up an elite secret US military unit that answers to no one but the president himself. Scahill reveals the existence of previously unreported secret prisons, kidnappings, assassinations, and cover-ups of covert operations gone terribly wrong.
In this remarkable story from the frontlines of the undeclared battlefields of the War on Terror, journalist Jeremy Scahill documents the new paradigm of American war: fought far from any declared battlefield, by units that do not officially exist, in thousands of operations a month that are never publicly acknowledged.
The devastating picture that emerges in Dirty Wars is of a secret US killing machine that has grown more powerful than whatever president happens to reside in the White House. Scahill argues that far from keeping the United States--and the world--safe from terrorism, these covert American wars ensure that the terror will grow and spread.
About the Author :
Jeremy Scahill is a frequent contributor to the Nation and a correspondent for the national radio and television program Democracy Now! A two-time winner of the prestigious George Polk Award, he has reported extensively from Iraq, and his exposure of the presence of Blackwater forces in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina sparked a Congressional inquiry and an internal Department of Homeland Security investigation.
Tom Weiner, a dialogue director and voice artist best known for his roles in video games and television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Transformers, is the winner of eight Earphones Awards and is an Audie Award finalist. He is a former member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Review :
"Dirty Wars is the most thorough and authoritative history I've read yet of the causes and consequences of America's post-9/11 conflation of war and national security. I know of no other journalist who could have written it: for over a decade, Scahill has visited the war zones, overt and covert; interviewed the soldiers, spooks, jihadists, and victims; and seen with his own eyes the fruits of America's bipartisan war fever. He risked his life many times over to write this book, and the result is a masterpiece of insight, journalism, and true patriotism."
-- "Barry Eisler, New York Times bestselling author "
"Dirty Wars shows you why geography shouldn't join penmanship on the list of obsolete American school disciplines before you even read a single page--in the maps at the front of the book: the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Mogadishu, Somalia--every one an American theater of war, no matter how few Americans realize it. For the next five-hundred pages, Scahill demonstrates how what we don't know can hurt us--and hurt lots of other people we don't know."
-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"
"A surefire hit for fans of Blackwater and studded with intriguing, occasionally damning material."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
"America's hand is exposed in this sprawling investigation of autonomous US military operations and the abuse of executive privilege that escalated global war. New York Times bestselling author Scahill pulls no punches from right or left in his exposure of governments that passively authorized the use of torture in interrogation, marked an American citizen for death without due process, and empowered a military branch to conduct warfare on their terms, turning at least four countries into war zones. Interviews with US army colonels, former CIA officers, Somali warlords, and a Yemeni sheik are only a few focal points in Scahill's narrative prism. Years of ground investigation are chronicled in stock terms, creating an accessible and shuddering effect: congress "asleep at the wheel," an enemy of the state "on a collision course with history," government officials who "cut their teeth" in the White House. Even in Scahill's most frustrated moments, fact supplants editorial, adding valiancy and devastation to his brutal portrayals."
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
"Scahill adds a thorough and unsentimental accounting of JSOC's brutal work in Iraq, including a review of the available evidence that prisoners interrogated at its facilities near Baghdad were tortured...Scahill weaves into his larger narrative the most detailed biography of Anwar Awlaki yet published. It is a riveting account."
-- "New Yorker"
"There is no journalist in America who has exposed the truth about US government militarism more bravely, more relentlessly, and more valuably than Jeremy Scahill. Dirty Wars is highly gripping and dramatic, and of unparalleled importance in understanding the destruction being sown in our name."
-- "Glenn Greenwald, New York Times bestselling author and Guardian columnist"
"With the war on terrorism as subterfuge, the US since the George W. Bush administration has embarked on a perpetual state of war, beyond borders, beyond the scrutiny of Congress, and beyond the codes of the Geneva Convention, according to Scahill, national security correspondent and author of the bestselling Blackwater. He offers a disturbing look at the secret forces, including the military and private security contractors, carrying out missions to capture and kill enemies designated by the president. Scahill details several operations...Drawing on interviews with mercenaries, CIA agents, and warriors in elite forces as well as those caught in the middle, Scahill examines the dark side of dirty wars, from the private pain of sufferers to the public cost in rising suspicion of the intentions of US foreign policy."
-- "Booklist"
"Without congressional declarations or public announcements, the United States is at war in more than one hundred countries. That is the conclusion that author and Nation National Security Correspondent Jeremy Scahill documents in his new book. He tracks elite covert US commandos on several continents as they use sniper attacks, drones, cruise missiles, kidnappings, and torture to complete their missions. Conducted without effective Congressional oversight or public scrutiny, these "black budget" operations have become favored foreign policy tools for Republican and Democrat presidents alike. A startling, headline-worthy indictment."
-- "Barnes&Noble.com, editorial review"
