War is Hell

     

     Continuing our apparent habit of watching depressing documentaries, Hannah and I chose to watch Dirty Wars this week. This is another film nominated for an Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary and yet again I could not tell you why.
     I strongly disliked this documentary from the beginning. It used heuristic statements intended to play on emotions and an extremely melodramatic style to create a reaction from the audience rather than to convey any sort of fact.

It follows the story of Jeremy Scahill (writer, producer, narrator and apparent star of the film) as he travels over the Middle East looking at the effects of a so called "secretive" branch of the military known as JSOC. He further documents his attempts at educating the public about JSOC's military endeavors. In the end, the film is more about Jeremy Scahill and how much he thinks he suffered learning the things he did.
     Throughout the entire piece Scahill  places an extreme emphasis on how hard things were for him. He talks about having to travel into the dangerous areas of Afghanistan, how he was pursued by federal agents (little to no evidence of this) how his computer was hacked (zero evidence of this). He seemed to want us to believe that he literally feared for his life on several occasions.
     Scahill makes several claims in this documentary and I will leave it up to the reader to decide how much of it to believe. There were only a few well established points of the documentary and these are the only ones which I will address.
1. The War on Terror has left us with unintended casualties
      This seems to be Scahill's main point. The military actions of the United States have caused the deaths of many civilians and even allies. I do not want to gloss over this point because it is important. None of us want to see any innocents killed, and especially children. The loss of civilian life is unacceptable and the United States Military goes to great lengths to avoid it. Scahill goes so far as to imply, if not say outright, that our actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and other parts of the Middle East are simply creating more martyrs for the Jihad against America. The problem is that he does not pose any solution to this problem. What does he think the US should do? Just allow the terrorists to continue their recruitment and training of jihadist?  Of course the United States wants no civilian casualties, but if it prevents the deaths of American civilians, their method seems to be working pretty well.
2. The President Ordered the Killing of an American Citizen without a Trial
    This was the only other well established point. That President Obama personally ordered the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.many others  These are things that are not brought up by Scahill. Hundreds of Al-Awlaki videos, that called for Muslims to kill any possible Americans were still up on YouTube until members of Congress asked Google to take them down in 2010. This unfortunately is not the end of the story. About two weeks later, after al-Awlaki was killed, a second drone strike killed his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. This killing was highlighted and emphasized in the documentary. As a 16 year old American citizen I think we can all agree that this is a very sad killing. What Scahill fails to mention, and what the media largely ignores, is that the son was in the company of 7 known Yemeni Al Qaeda leaders. Sixteen years old or not, American citizen or not, he definitely would have known that he was in dangerous company. He would have known that by simply being in the company of these men he could not return to the United States without the risk of arrest and trial for treason.

This is naturally concerning to any American Citizen, after all he was only using his right to Free Speech. Except of course that he was inciting the killing of American Civilians, supporting Al Qaeda and actively recruiting Muslims for a Jihad against America. He had connections to the Fort Hood Shooter and inspired the Boston Marathon bombings as well as
     All this to say, Dirty Wars should not be considered a valid entry for Best Documentary of the year as it does not portray any fact. It is simply a melodramatic film about a journalist experience attempting to muckrake.