Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield

In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater, takes us inside America’s new covert wars. As he reveals, the foot soldiers in these battles operate daily across the globe and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture, or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies of America.

Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former Blackwater and other private security contractors, the CIA’s Special Activities Division, and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), these elite soldiers operate across the globe, with thousands of secret commandos working in more than one hundred countries. Funded through “black budgets,” Special Operations Forces conduct missions in denied areas, engage in targeted assassinations, snatch and grab individuals, and direct drone, AC-130, and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, Scahill explains how President Barack Obama has expanded their operations and given them new scope and legitimacy.

Dirty Wars follows the consequences of the declaration that “the world is a battlefield” as Scahill uncovers the most important foreign policy story of our time. From Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond, Scahill reports from the frontlines of his high-stakes investigation and explores the depths of America’s global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of America’s covert wars, conducted in the shadows, outside the range of the press, without effective Congressional oversight or public debate. And, based on unprecedented access, Scahill tells the chilling story of two U.S. citizens marked for assassination by their own government.

As America’s secret wars spread violence and chaos across the planet, the country is being drawn ever deeper into conflicts with the potential for enormous blowback and instability, putting us all at greater risk and changing us as a nation. Scahill opens a devastating window into the secretive world of the shadow warriors tasked with prosecuting these wars. Through his brave reportage, the human casualties of this unaccountable violence — the victims of torture in so-called black detention sites and the survivors of night raids and drone strikes — are also given a voice, putting a human face on the dirty wars the United States struggles to keep hidden.