Sunday, April 28, 2013

TODAY! Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield - Scahill, Goodman, Chomsky


Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman, and Noam Chomsky

When: Saturday, April 27, 2013, 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Where: Harvard University, Science Center B, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge

Please join us for a discussion of Jeremy Scahill’s important new book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (Nation Books, April 23, 2013).

http://map.harvard.edu/mapserver/campusmap.htm

Please join investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, author Noam Chomsky, and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman for the special discussion of Scahill's ground breaking new book Dirty Wars.

Jeremy Scahill is National Security Correspondent for the Nation magazine and author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill is a frequent guest on a wide array of programs, appearing regularly on The Rachel Maddow Show, Real Time with Bill Maher and Democracy Now! He has also appeared on Fresh Air, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, CNN, PBS NewsHour and Bill Moyers Journal. Scahill’s work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for his book Blackwater. He is also the subject of the film Dirty Wars (http://dirtywars.org/), an official selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. The film opens in theaters June 7 through Sundance Selects.

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now! (http://www.democracynow.org/), a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and author of numerous books, including Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, Imperial Ambitions, What We Say Goes, Interventions, and Hopes and Prospects.

In Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill, author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater, takes us inside America’s new covert wars. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally 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.

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 worldwide, 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 killings, snatch and grab individuals and direct drone, AC-130 and cruise missile strikes. While the Bush administration deployed these ghost militias, 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 in this high-stakes investigation and explores the depths of America’s global killing machine. He goes beneath the surface of these 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 an American citizen marked for assassination by his own government.

As US leaders draw the country deeper into conflicts across the globe, setting the world stage for enormous destabilization and blowback, Americans are not only at greater risk—we are changing as a nation. Scahill unmasks the shadow warriors who prosecute these secret wars and puts a human face on the casualties of unaccountable violence that is now official policy: victims of night raids, secret prisons, cruise missile attacks and drone strikes, and whole classes of people branded as “suspected militants.” Through his brave reporting, Scahill exposes the true nature of the dirty wars the United States government struggles to keep hidden.

Praise for Dirty Wars:

“There is no journalist in America who has exposed the truth about US government militarism more bravely, more relentlessly and more valuably than Jeremy Scahill. Dirty Wars is highly gripping and dramatic, and of unparalleled importance in understanding the destruction being sown in our name.”
—Glenn Greenwald, New York Times best-selling author and Guardian columnist

“Dirty Wars tells us, with convincing detail and much new information, what has been done in the name of America since 9/11.”
—Seymour Hersh

“Dirty Wars is the most thorough and authoritative history I’ve read yet of the causes and consequences of America’s post-9/11 conflation of war and national security. I know of no other journalist who could have written it: For over a decade, Scahill has visited the war zones, overt and covert; interviewed the soldiers, spooks, jihadists, and victims; and seen with his own eyes the fruits of America’s bipartisan war fever. He risked his life many times over to write this book, and the result is a masterpiece of insight, journalism, and true patriotism.”
—Barry Eisler, novelist and former operative in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations

Free. General admission. Attendance is first come, first served.

Sponsored by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, the ACLU of Massachusetts, Nation Institute, American Friends Service Committee, the Cambridge Peace Commission, and the Community Church of Boston.

For more information about the book, film, and Scahill, visit:
http://dirtywars.org/

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