About the Book
Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 sent shockwaves across the globe. His melding of chaos, incompetence, corruption and viciousness as president combined with his clear affinity for authoritarianism and international despots poses a direct threat to some of the most vulnerable people in the US and the world. At the same time, Trump has proven adept at sparking the rage of the elite, bipartisan political class in the US, often drawing the greatest ire for positions that ultimately challenge the sacred cows of American imperialism. His sudden announcement that he would withdraw troops from Syria in late 2018 and his pledge to do the same in Afghanistan elicited immediate panic and condemnation from powerful Democrats and Republicans alike. Trump's public attack on the CIA, comparing the spy agency to the Nazis, made after he had already won the election, was unprecedented in US history. Award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahil argues that Trump's ascent has pulled back the curtain on a sacred bond between hawkish Democratic Party elites and extreme right wing neoconservatives.
About the Author :
Jeremy Scahill confronts America's War on Terror--a campaign of assassinations, drone strikes, surveillance, and covert ops--with rare insight. In talks, he draws from his nearly two decades of investigative reporting to illuminate the biased media coverage and hidden agendas of US foreign policy. In so doing, he offers an ethical appeal for greater transparency and accountability in both election coverage and international journalism.
An investigative reporter and war correspondent, Jeremy Scahill is one of the three founding editors of The Intercept. His latest book, featuring a foreword by Edward Snowden and written with the staff of The Intercept, is The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program. He is also the international bestselling author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. The film adaptation of Dirty Wars, which he wrote, produced, and narrates, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Teju Cole calls the book "[A] courageous and exhaustive examination of the way a number of clandestine campaigns--full of crimes, cover-ups, and assassinations--became the United States' main strategy for combating terrorism."
Scahill has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. He has served as the national security correspondent for The Nation and Democracy Now!. His work has sparked several congressional investigations and has twice won the George Polk Book Award, one of journalism's highest honors.
Review :
Praise for Dirty Wars
"[A] fantastic piece of investigative reporting." --Noam Chomsky
"Scahill (Blackwater) 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 warzones." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
"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 U.S. foreign policy." --Vanessa Bush
"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
"A surefire hit for fans of Blackwater and studded with intriguing, occasionally damning material." --Kirkus Reviews
"[A] courageous and exhaustive examination of the way a number of clandestine campaigns-full of crimes, coverups, and assassinations-became the United States's main strategy for combating terrorism." --Teju Cole, The New Yorker's 'Best Books of 2013'
"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 500 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
"There is no journalist in America, in the world, who has reported on what the war on terror actually looks like under the Obama administration better than [Scahill]." --Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes
"Dirty Wars will earn its place in history as one of the most important pieces of literature related to over a decade of failed American foreign policy strategy that continues to exist to this day." --Brandon Webb, retired member of Navy SEAL Team Three, former lead sniper instructor at the US Naval Special Warfare Command and author of the New York Times bestseller The Red Circle
"Scahill's book takes us inside Dick Cheney's famed "dark side" and tells us, with convincing detail and much new information, what has been done in the name of America since 9/11." --Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
"[One] of the best intelligence reporters on the planet...Scahill has covered the worldwide wanderings of JSOC task forces and their intersection for years, and he takes a deeper look at their expanded post 9/11 mission set. He has incredible sources..." --Marc Ambinder, editor-at-large of The Week
Praise for the Assassination Complex
"A searing indictment of the U.S. drone program." --Lawrence D. Freedman Foreign Affairs
"Readers will be left in no doubt that drone warfare affronts morality and the Constitution. . . . Convincing and damning." --Kirkus Reviews
"A searing, facts-driven indictment of America's drone wars and their implications for U.S. democracy and foreign policy. A must-read for concerned citizens." --Library Journal, starred review
Praise for Blackwater
"A crackling exposé of the secretive military contractor Blackwater." --The New York Times Book Review
"[Scahill] is a one-man truth squad." --Bill Moyers
"[An] utterly gripping and explosive story." --Naomi Klein, The Guardian
"Andy McNab couldn't have invented this prescient tale of the private army of mercenaries run by a Christian conservative millionaire who, in turn, bankrolls the president. A chilling exposé of the ultimate military outsource." --Christopher Fowler, The New Review
