In Minority Report, the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie, the job of PreCrime, a specialised police department, is not to hunt down current criminals but to track down future criminals. The movie is set in the year 2054, apparently because the Spielberg crew might have thought such police operations were a distant reality. Perhaps the Academy Award-winning director could read journalist Jeremy Scahill's latest book, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, which says the pre-crime hunt is already here, though in the name of the war on terror.
The United States' "kill lists" may not always include identified terrorists. The lists were expanded to become a form of "pre-crime" justice whereby individuals are considered targets if they meet certain life patterns of terror suspects. These people, described as "military aged-males", would be targeted if they were at a certain place at certain times, writes Mr Scahill, a correspondent for The Nation magazine. His previous book, Blackwater, was an international bestseller.
When the liberal America was busy attacking the legacy of George W Bush after Barack Obama became president, Paul Wolfowitz, Mr Bush's deputy secretary of defence, wrote in Foreign Policy that, despite President Obama's rhetoric of "change", Mr Bush's national security doctrine was largely irreversible. Mr Scahill argues in the book that Mr Bush's security campaigns were in fact intensified under the Obama presidency. He powerfully documents in Dirty Wars how President Obama embraced the hawks and the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to take America's war machinery across the world.
The book begins with the neoconservative movement in the US, which was aimed at remaking the world according to US interests. Its key members, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, came to the White House with their own agenda. They had the blessings of the president. The September 11 attacks gave them a strong legitimate reason for this unleashing of American hard power on other nations. On September 14, 2001, the House and the Senate gave Mr Bush unprecedented latitude to wage a global war, passing the authorisation for use of military force. "Empowered by an overwhelming bipartisan endorsement of a global borderless war against a stateless enemy, the Bush administration declared the world a battlefield," writes Mr Scahill. Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division and the JSOC, American elite soldiers now operate worldwide, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than a hundred countries. While the Bush administration deployed these militias, President Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy. President Obama's drone campaign, as Mr Scahill later said in an interview to the Guardian, has "normalised assassination as a central component of what is called America's national security policy".
"It [the drone war] is the politically advantageous thing to do - low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness," Admiral Dennis Blair, President Obama's former director of national intelligence, is quoted as saying in the book. "It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term." Over the past decade, the US has ordered at least 300 drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and Mali, taking out some high-level Al Qaeda targets, but also killing some 2,000 civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Between 2000 and 2008, President Bush ordered about 50 drone strikes against alleged terrorists. President Obama is believed to have ordered nearly 300 in his first term and only intensified the campaign in the second term. The killing of civilians by these machines is not widely discussed in contemporary war literature, since the ideology of national security eclipses any structural critique of the security policy of the world's most powerful nation. Dirty Wars, however, looks beyond the security doctrine of Washington, and that's what makes it one of the most important foreign policy stories of our time. It is, of course, not the first book to do so: David E Sanger's Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power and Mark Mazzetti's The Way of the Knife both cover and comment on this disturbing aspects of President Obama's security policy, but Dirty Wars is a useful addition to the discourse.
Mr Scahill also investigates, from the front lines, how Somalia, parts of Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan have become hotbeds for Al Qaeda activity. His detailed investigations conclude that Al Qaeda and the US' covert security-industrial complex have come to resemble each other; both are advancing their chief cause - killing. Human rights and human life have been cheapened across the planet as a result of this war.
"US unilateralism and exceptionalism were not only bipartisan principals in Washington, but a permanent American institution," writes Mr Scahill. Any hope that America's setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan would force policy makers in Washington to rethink their military engagements was lost, thanks to the simultaneous escalation of the country's "use of drones, cruise missiles, Special Ops raids in an unprecedented number of countries". The author asks Americans to ask themselves: "How does a war like this ever end?"
DIRTY WARS: THE WORLD IS A BATTLEFIELD
Jeremy Scahill
Serpent's Tail
Rs 899; 642 pages
The United States' "kill lists" may not always include identified terrorists. The lists were expanded to become a form of "pre-crime" justice whereby individuals are considered targets if they meet certain life patterns of terror suspects. These people, described as "military aged-males", would be targeted if they were at a certain place at certain times, writes Mr Scahill, a correspondent for The Nation magazine. His previous book, Blackwater, was an international bestseller.
When the liberal America was busy attacking the legacy of George W Bush after Barack Obama became president, Paul Wolfowitz, Mr Bush's deputy secretary of defence, wrote in Foreign Policy that, despite President Obama's rhetoric of "change", Mr Bush's national security doctrine was largely irreversible. Mr Scahill argues in the book that Mr Bush's security campaigns were in fact intensified under the Obama presidency. He powerfully documents in Dirty Wars how President Obama embraced the hawks and the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to take America's war machinery across the world.
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"It [the drone war] is the politically advantageous thing to do - low cost, no US casualties, gives the appearance of toughness," Admiral Dennis Blair, President Obama's former director of national intelligence, is quoted as saying in the book. "It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term." Over the past decade, the US has ordered at least 300 drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and Mali, taking out some high-level Al Qaeda targets, but also killing some 2,000 civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Between 2000 and 2008, President Bush ordered about 50 drone strikes against alleged terrorists. President Obama is believed to have ordered nearly 300 in his first term and only intensified the campaign in the second term. The killing of civilians by these machines is not widely discussed in contemporary war literature, since the ideology of national security eclipses any structural critique of the security policy of the world's most powerful nation. Dirty Wars, however, looks beyond the security doctrine of Washington, and that's what makes it one of the most important foreign policy stories of our time. It is, of course, not the first book to do so: David E Sanger's Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power and Mark Mazzetti's The Way of the Knife both cover and comment on this disturbing aspects of President Obama's security policy, but Dirty Wars is a useful addition to the discourse.
Mr Scahill also investigates, from the front lines, how Somalia, parts of Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan have become hotbeds for Al Qaeda activity. His detailed investigations conclude that Al Qaeda and the US' covert security-industrial complex have come to resemble each other; both are advancing their chief cause - killing. Human rights and human life have been cheapened across the planet as a result of this war.
"US unilateralism and exceptionalism were not only bipartisan principals in Washington, but a permanent American institution," writes Mr Scahill. Any hope that America's setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan would force policy makers in Washington to rethink their military engagements was lost, thanks to the simultaneous escalation of the country's "use of drones, cruise missiles, Special Ops raids in an unprecedented number of countries". The author asks Americans to ask themselves: "How does a war like this ever end?"
DIRTY WARS: THE WORLD IS A BATTLEFIELD
Jeremy Scahill
Serpent's Tail
Rs 899; 642 pages