Jeremy ScahillReseñas

This is by any measure one of the high spots of investigative journalism over the past decade; it is comprehensive in every sense: exposition, narrative, and documentation, and Jeremy Scahill is a solid journalistic prose stylist. You won't find, I suspect, a more exhaustive study of private mercenary armies, their role in the overall corporate defense contracting infrastructure, or the threat they pose to our democratic republic. At the time of this book's publication, I saw Jeremy Scahill interviewed on one news program or another several times, and each time his interlocuter had to ask why organizations like Blackwater threaten democracy. The strength of this book--and Mr. Scahill as a writer--rests in the fact that while it provides you facts, it never presents conclusions. The facts themselves perform that task, which is what we ought to expect from our best journalists. Jeremy Scahill joins their ranks with this book.

better than his book on Blackwater, but still, such a superficial treatment, even basic things not covered, like military refusal to obey order to kill American citizens without trial, how then it was done, and obvious Al Qaeda basics on Awlaki and Samir Khan...very annoying, not sure why he writes such 1/2 stories....even so, at least he gives some exposure to the US assassination of her own citizens and names names, even some of the few who spoke out against it (Dennis Kucinich, for ex)½

Facts are great. Accompanying opinions with said facts, not so much.

Audiobook.

Audiobook.

You go into the book thinking Erik Prince is Darth Vader.

He's not. He's more akin to Director Krennic: a manipulator of corrupt institutions that simply don't value life.

The real shock of Scahill's excellent coverage is just how banal the evil of the mercenary business is. Much like imperialist and colonial military dogma, the expansion of the private security contractors--mercenaries--boils down to exploitation and indifference. Exploitation of government policy to procure highly suspect security contracts and indifference towards the lives of the foreign populations affected by private militaries that are not beholden to account for war crimes.

My God.

Imagine there's a country out there that asserts it can assassinate it's own citizens based on executive power alone? Further, it can assassinate that citizen's children with impunity, even when that child is a citizen too.

That country is America. That executive wasn't just the Bush Administration or the current batshit one. No the President at the time was Barack Obama.

Scahill takes what might be merely an anti-state polemic in another journalist's hands and crafts an amazing collection of stories on the war on terror and all it's unintended consequences. This isn't a Bob Woodward special, but rather like Chomsky in the field with teeth. From the blowback of the US radicalizing allies and it's own citizens, to the sheer lack of concern for civilian casualties and the assumption that American black ops are unquestionable, Scahill just crushes any hope you can have in the competence of US anti-terrorism let alone the state's moral authority in that war.

The investigation behind the Gardez Massacre alone--a botched JSOC raid of innocent civilians which was then covered up via carving bullets out of butchered women--is stunning. https://theintercept.com/2016/06/01/pentagon-special-ops-killing-of-pregnant-afg...

The Raymond Davis "incident" reads like a John Le Carre novel except it exposes US officials for lacking the spymaster's knowing sense of moral ambiguity and humanity.

America's use and embrace of extrajudicial killing is pure nightmare fuel.

Scahill goes into realms less traversed; that of dirty politicking in which governments set-up and arm belligerents for multiple gains but only to have them later turn against their benefactors. What is worse is that to subdue these belligerents, governments resort to underhand tactics in which non-combatants suffer more than the actual combatants. This only exacerbates an already escalating conflict. Scahill does not advise as to how to prevent these conflicts, but treads the moral high ground to evoke our sympathies and he succeeds.

The only discouraging element of this book is its military-political jargon. Keep your dictionaries close for this one.

Picture this: On one side, you have a fanatical group with exceptionally strong opinions, who plan and execute an operation to terrorize their enemies. They have a specific target (or targets) in mind, and they aren't really concerned with the loss of innocent life. After all, if those innocents are within the blast range of their targets, well, they're obviously colluding with the enemy, right? So, they're collateral damage, and no one will shed a tear for them.

Now...am I talking about the 9/11 attacks? Or the attacks the US waged over the next two decades against their global enemies?

There's no good guys to be found in this book.

I can remember watching President Bush on TV in the days after the attacks on 9/11, and his call to arms for all allies of the US to help defeat those that hated the US. And believe me, I was as horrified by what I watched on my TV on the morning of September 11, 2001 as anyone else.

But as I watched Bush, I couldn't help but draw parallels with the rhetoric he pushed, and those that had perpetrated the attacks on the US.

George W. Bush: "This is a reminder that we are at war with extremists who will murder innocent people to achieve their ideological objectives."

Because, under both Bush and Obama, the US happily, gleefully, and with full awareness, murdered probably more innocent people during their reigns as presidents than the Al-Qaeda managed on that horrible day in the pursuit of achieving their own ideological objectives.

Who's right? Who's wrong? Who's justified? Who's not?

It gets muddy.

But really, for me, this became the modern day "Red Scare" that we went through in the 50s. Instead of a Red under your bed, and a Commie coming after your freedoms, it was some scary brown-skinned guy who worshipped Allah. And just like when we were terrified of the Commies and got into a nuclear arms race to see who could build up more weapons to wipe out the planet, now the US, goaded by the initial attacks, entered into a terror race, to see which side could rack up more kills.

I'm not defending either side. And I totally understand the desire, after watching the towers fall, for revenge. I do.

But, an eye for an eye ultimately leads to blind rage, and that's what this terrifying book lays out. There's no single person to blame, just a lot of old men with too much pride and bloodlust and fervent belief in "our side"—whichever side that may be—to take a step back and wonder if what they're doing is right. To wonder if, in their push for revenge, they're not increasing the need for the other side—whichever side that may be—for revenge as well.

This is a tough book to read, and there's a lot to unpack here. But it's worth the read.

An important and terrifying book. Everytime the reader thinks their moral outrage can't get any more inflamed, another section is read.

Is it the fact that killing enemy targets eliminates any ability to gather useful intelligence? Dropping a bomb on someone remotely means you can't recover their cell phone, or any papers, or even their damn wallet.

Is it the fact that killing enemy targets in ridiculously imprecise? Something like 90% of the kills are the poor bastards who happen to be around that target at that time. It's like swatting a fly by dropping a car on it.

Is it the fact that the manner of identifying the enemy targets is even more imprecise than the kills? Yeah, we're pretty sure this is the dude. No, we can't see him. No, we can't 100% confirm. But we're pretty sure it's his cell phone, and we only have 60 days to turn him into a greasespot, and we're on day 58, so frag that fucker. We'll sort it out later.

Or, is it the fact that much of the tech is now being used in the US to dig illegally into America's citizens. Think your phone is safe? Yeah, well, to quote an old TV line, "what colour is the sky in your world?"

Reading this, you realize that when the World Trade Center towers fell two decades ago, we lost a lot more than the lives and innocence. We lost our right to privacy. Everyone is guilty now, until proven innocent.

Or, until they're located by their SIM card and bombed out of existence.

This book just confirms what we all know: the Untied (spelling intentional) States of America is a seriously fucked-up place.

This book terrified me. Overly-powerful fanatical men, believing they are working for the Christian God—the only God—turn killing into a multi-billion dollar industry to overthrow all those crazy-ass overly-powerful fanatical men who believe they are working for their god or gods.

In the middle, you have the highly-trained men who are simply in it for the massive payday.

War is big business, and business is good.

It blows my mind that all these Republicans believe they're morally right pulling all this shit (and no, I'm not naive enough to believe the Dems are much better).

I've said it before, I'll say it again. There's more than enough religion in the world to start wars, but nowhere near enough to end them.

Great book about the GWOT and how dirty this kind of war fighting is.

"Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield", by Jeremy Scahill, takes a detailed look at the U.S. "War on Terror", at the initial decisions which brought us there under the Bush Administration, and how it's been continued and extended, albeit under a different name, under the Obama Administration. The book provides an extensive look at Special Forces, conventional forces, CIA targeting, night raids, and drone strikes, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in diverse locations such as Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc.

I found Scahill's coverage of American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, known for his anti-American speeches after his move to Yemen following the World Trade Tower attack of 9/11, particularly interesting. I knew little of his background, and not much more about the effects of his speeches other than what I remember reading in the newspaper after he became targeted as a jihadist recruiter. I either had forgotten, or never knew of his influential role on the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston Marathon bombers), on U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan (the Fort Hood massacre shooter) , on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the underwear bomber), on Faisal Shahzad (the Times Square bomber) and others. And while Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike, his speeches apparently still resonate as demonstrated by his reported influence on the recent Boston Marathon bombing a year and a half after his death.

The drone strike against al-Awlaki and others are discussed in some detail. More importantly, Scahill discusses this "dark side" of American war-fighting, and reveals the human and political consequences of these "dirty wars" the U. S. tries to keep mostly hidden. Scahill points out the down side of increased armed drone attacks, not only in terms of their use against American Citizens without judicial review, but in particular due to the inexact targeting of such strikes and the frequent "collateral damage" taken on non-combatant civilians including women and children. While the Administration frequently emphasizes the "precision" of these weapons, we've all read about situations in which targeting intelligence was faulty, or guidance systems failed, resulting in unfortunate deaths of innocent civilians. And when those unfortunate mistakes occur, survivors or family members of slain victims who had no ties to terrorism often turn to vengeance and hatred of the U.S. as a result.

Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under Bush, had previously questioned if the U.S. was eliminating terrorists faster than the Imams and Madrassas were creating them. Scahill's book asks the same question in a slightly different way, i.e., are our anti-terrorist methods (night raids, drone strikes) creating more and more new terrorists much faster than our ability to eliminate individual terrorists here and there. It doesn't appear that this question will be answered any time soon.

You can read the book jacket to see what it's about, but I found it more interesting than I expected. And following the reports about Blackwater in the news appears to be only part of the story. A good study of a troubling trend.

Very troubling.

A good read, but like in The Assassination Complex, there are repetitive sentences and passages, I'm guessing coming from having a series of longform articles compiled into a book. Still surprising to see the extent of this, the huge amounts of money, the extraordinary legal gray areas that complicit politicians carved out to make PMCs effectively immune from prosecution.

Some basic Wikipedia perusal, Blackwater, rebranded Academi, has merged with several other PMCs under an umbrella holding company.

A book about "Blackwater" could have been easily turned into yet another "conspiracy theory" storytelling, but instead this book is something else.

Nonetheless, if you are looking for something that will raise your outrage, this book has plenty of material that can test your moral sense.

In this extensively documented book (out of almost 500 pages, 100 are just of footnotes and bibligraphical references), you will find plenty of stories about cronyism, political convergence, and business development strategy, as well as the expected reviews of incidents and recruitment plus deployment practices.

But, personally, I decided to read it for something else.

I was interested in stories about logistics and procurement when private and public armed activities share the same space.

Another book "An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943" (https://www.librarything.com/work/13178/book/81996115), showed how in WWII modern war logistics was in its infancy.

Nowadays, we live in a more complex world.

And, in our complex world, most countries dropped the "draft".

I served just one year in Italy, compulsory service.

In my time, I worked a bit also on logistics and procurement, but civilians were just suppliers, not part of joint operations.

If you remove the draft and create a professional army, this has some impacts, and when you then cut down the costs, plenty of restructuring of activities and processes is needed.

And when you do more with less? Eventually, you might have to outsource, if you cannot wait to expand again your footprint.

In business, I worked extensively within various forms of outsourcing, and therefore I am familiar with the side-effects on an organization getting "addicted" to outsourcing also for what is mission-critical (i.e. "core business").

And, of course, I was interested to read how a training facility turned into a private provider of security details, scaling up to almost brigade level (my group was reporting at a divisional level, a notch up in the complexity level, but we fired weapons only in training exercises, albeit some NCOs told stories of when they had been deployed to a previous UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon).

Redundancy and check-and-balances is what you expect from an army that, as is normal within NATO countries, reports to politicians, who, in turn, are elected.

Once I asked a non-Italian friend who had served as a professional if he ever considered serving as a private contractor, and his answer resonated often through this book: no- more money, less armour.

When a supplier can influence your strategy and operations, you have to add to your own complexities a further layer: continuously ensuring that your suppliers' purposes do not interfere with your own.

This book shares some episodes where this "alignment" was at best questionable, but the lessons could actually be translated into something useful in less-critical (but still business) situations.

A further layer in this book is adding more depth on "sidelines", as explaining the context of some episodes requires backtracking and doing plenty of "flash-back" episodes.

This sometimes makes the prose slightly heavy, but it is worth getting through it, also if once in a while sounds as "Cloud Atlas" (it all converges in the end).

So, beside what you could expect from the title "Blackwater" and subtitle "

Anyway, interesting, and here and there even an amusing reading, albeit sometimes you wonder how some of the episodes could have happened at all.

Covers the rise of mercenaries, exemplified by Blackwater, who are receiving very large amounts of money to keep the peace in hotspots around the world. Of course, while Blackwater's owner and senior staff are paid handsomely, the same cannot be said of many of the soldiers serving in dangerous areas. While some sections drag, overall "Blackwater" is a quite frightening insight into how war is making some people very rich (and did the founder name his company "Blackwater" specifically because it sounded ominous?)½

A comprehensive and a bit shocking overview of Blackwater and the privatization of our military capabilities.the US is using a private army in the Middle East that has been built by Christian evangelicals - radicals...½

Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill is a non-fiction book, examining the policies of the United States, and the consequences, on the War on Terrorism. Mr. Scahill is an editor and journalist for online and print publications.

This is not an easy book to read, especially for a patriotic American. Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill pulls no punches, is not afraid to commend, but mainly criticize policies, politicians, and those who are at the edge of the spear implementing them.

Mr. Scahill analyzes ideology, religion and politics, not afraid to criticize policies or individuals (mostly policy makers). The author goes to great lengths into relevant history to give the reader some context about decisions made. The history delves into people, what made them who they are and how they became true believers in their own policies. Not only Americans, but Muslim clerics and radicals.

The historical background and analysis helps the author connect seemingly unrelated events and their impacts on policies and practices. The research in this book in incredible, the topics which lack media exposure are as important as ever these days.

There is a ton of information in this book, a lot of detail which is important, but sometimes masks the important questions the author brings forward. I did not think the book was well organized, the author tries to make the information coherent, but it’s easy to get mixed up and at times gets difficult to read.

An engaging, heavy, uncomfortable yet interesting read. For those who are interested in foreign policy and international affairs, this book is a must read.

For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

This audio book is TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LONG. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the Song of Ice and Fire audio books is like 48 hours, but following a non-fiction book for 24 hours is a challenge for me. Mr. Scahill does a great job of creating a narrative story in the 680 pages of the book, but there are names of people and places that are unfamiliar, which increased the challenge of keeping up.

I bought this because I had an audible subscription with some extra credits, and the book received great reviews among the political folks I know. Plus, Mr. Scahill wrote Blackwater, which I reviewed last year. He is a journalist who is interested in the war on terror and all the ways it has affected (or perhaps revealed) U.S. military values. Coming on the heels of the release of the torture report at the end of 2014, I can't help but continue to question nearly everything we are told about this war, the need for it, and how ethically the U.S. military and CIA are acting.

Can we justify assassinating U.S. citizens, killing them without a trial? Can we justify drone strikes that definitely kill innocent civilians because it (might) kill a person who wishes harm to the U.S.? Can we justify the fear that people living in countries like Yemen have as they hear the hum of drones over their heads? And even if we can find a way to justify these actions, should we? What does it say about us that we elect leaders who implement or continue such policies? What does it say about our military leaders that they are willing to take these actions, or about our judicial system if it allows it?

I don't have the answers. I know that much of what I heard was disturbing. I know that while President Obama has done some great things for this country, his record in this area is deeply, deeply troubling. I also know that there are some people who are acting in despicable ways and yet are utterly convinced that they are saviors on earth, a sort of second coming sent to save the U.S. That should worry us all.

From my Cannonball Read V review...

Just to make sure we're all on the same page: Blackwater is a horrible, horrible, horrible company, right? Like, everyone with a conscience is aware of that fact? Everyone who works there is not a horrible person (many are just trying to survive), but we all know that the organization is bloody awful, yes?

Okay, so starting from that premise, why read a book that tells you in detail about how horrible it is? Because it's good. Really good. It is very well researched, with a level of detail in the writing that brings home the realities of just how atrocious an organization this is.

Scahill provides a history of the company, from its roots in the southern U.S., through the Iraq war and into present day, where Blackwater (now ACADEMI) has truly terrifying plans. He discusses the problems of a mercenary army - recruitment, payment, accountability (well, lack thereof), lawlessness. He uses the murder of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah as backdrop against which the book is set, returning to what happened, how it happened, and the impact on the families. That running story points out how expendable these contractors are to the company. Their lives may be on the line, and they may be getting great compensation (unless they are from South American or Africa, which Scahill addresses in the book), but in the end, the company doesn't care about them. Their deaths are a PR issue, but that's about it.

The biggest problem with contractors like Blackwater from the perspective of the county and the world is that they are essentially mercenaries. They are paid to protect the elite, to do things that our military might or might not be able to do, and they aren’t accountable to anyone. They may technically be subcontractors, but they aren’t covered by the same laws as private citizens, and they pretend to be military even though they don’t have the same oversight. They can do whatever they want with minimal consequences; claiming immunity as a quasi-military organization. It’s despicable.

From the perspective of the families of the contractors who are killed due to the careless policies of Blackwater (and, by extension, the U.S. government for contracting with them), these contractors don’t get the same respect and care as the military. Some of them may be doing work that troops would have done in the past, but because they aren’t military, they don’t get the same benefits, or support. Is that wrong? I don’t know. You can argue they know what they signed up for, but Blackwater is so shady that who knows what they were really told, and how much time they all had to really review what they signed.

Beyond the tasks Blackwater performed in Iraq and Afghanistan, they also ingratiated themselves in the Katrina response, taking part in disaster profiteering. They lied about saving lives, and tried to not pay the contractors the prevailing ways.

This company isn’t just bad for the reasons stated above; they are bad because of what they represent: a shift from governmental accountability to private (stockholder / owner) accountability. One thing about war is that the country is supposed to feel the consequences of it. It should keep us from just going to war with anyone we dislike, without cause. But as more of the actions are shifted to mercenary companies like Blackwater, who’s to speak up and say it’s not okay?

If you have any interest in this, and want to have some details to back up your understanding that Blackwater is just appalling, check out the book.

An anthology of articles from The Intercept, so there's a lot of repetition.

Based on leaked documents, this book gives an inside look at America's military drone program.

Publicly, drone strikes are used only on those who are deemed an imminent threat to America, including American citizens living abroad. The intelligence community is as sure as they can be that they know Terrorist X's exact location and that the possibility of civilian casualties is reduced as much as possible. That's not the reality.

In countries like Somalia and Yemen, America has very few people on the ground who can confirm Terrorist X's location at any given time. Therefore, America relies on tracking their cellphones. Some drones carry what is, in effect, a fake cellphone tower. When Terrorist X's cellphone makes a call, it is forced to connect to that fake tower. The location is pinpointed. The possibility that the cellphone is in the possession of Terrorist X's wife or cousin, or that the SIM card was taken out and given to an associate, is not considered. Civilians who are killed in a drone strike are usually called "militants."

The book talks about America's no-fly lists (there is more than one list). How a person gets on, and off, the list is highly classified. Evidently giving Americans a way to get off the list would hamper the War on Terror. Ramstein Air Base in Germany is a vital relay point between drones flying around Southwest Asia, and their pilots back in America. Officially, this is in violation of German law, but the German Government intentionally does not ask America about it. Ultimately, despite the occasional high profile, and extrajudicial, killing, the drone program has not had much effect on Al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

This book deserves six stars. It is fascinating, eye-opening, upsetting and very highly recommended for all Americans.

read like a rather careless collection of stories that had previously published on the intercept. at times repetitive. also the same events are repeatedly represented differently in different sections of the book (sloppy editing!). the whole book is saved by the afterword by Glen Greenwald.