Jeremy Scahill's documentary film "Dirty Wars" is an excellent expose of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), the expanding, menacing, mostly secret assassination unit that reports only to the President. We hear of kill lists, night raids, kill campaigns, unnamed targets. But the questions remains -- what to do about it?
An anonymous informant in the film describes the US engagement against the perceived global terrorism threat: "The whole world is a battlefield and we are at war everywhere." While perhaps a slight exaggeration -- the specified numbers are dozens or hundreds of simultaneous covert operations in 40-75 countries -- Scahill himself at one point sees so many different tentacles of JSOC activity he isn't sure how to chose which one to pursue in his investigation. How then does the peace and justice/antiwar movement respond?
Once concentrated on opposing the war on Iraq and able to organize huge street protests, the peace movement now is faced with an imperial war strategy that conducts multiple smaller, far flung operations at the same time. The operations, furthermore, are mostly so hidden and shadowy that neither the conventional US military nor Congress knows much about them, much less the American public. And the new covert strategy is even bigger than described by Scahill, because it includes scarcely publicized economic sanctions (such as against Iran) and cyberwar, attacking computer and IT systems.
