“Dirty Wars” Receives Oscar Nomination

Earlier this morning the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences
announced their nominations for the 86th Academy Awards. Jeremy
Scahill’s film, “Dirty Wars” is
among the honorees for best documentary. Reason TV sat down with
Scahill last summer to discuss the film and America’s global war on
terror.

Here is the original text from the in-depth interview, which ran
on June 13, 2013:

Jeremy Scahill, National Security Correspondent
for The Nation, is the
author of the best-selling new
book Dirty Wars: The
World is a Battlefield and the writer, producer and
subject of an award-winning documentary of the same name,
which goes into wide
theatrical release this week.

Scahill sat with Reason’s Matt Welch for an extended
conversation about the book and movie, which thoroughly investigate
the way America conducts its covert wars in the post-9/11 world,
and how Barack Obama’s embrace of drone strikes, rendition, and
targeted assassination have cemented the policies of the Bush
Administration which declared the entire world “a battlefield.”

Other subjects discussed include Scahill’s skepticism of
President Obama’s recent foreign policy “rethink” speech (14:00);
how any adult male in a drone strike area is posthumously labeled a
“suspected militant,” (16:15); the Department of Justice’s absurdly
broad definition of an “imminent threat,” (20:15); the mysterious
case of the American-born terror-advocating imam Anwar al-Alwaki,
who was assassinated by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen (21:15); the
“shameful” persecution of Yemeni journalistAbdulelah
Haider Shaye, who was set to be pardoned and released by the
government of Yemen until President Obama intervened (32:31); his
disappointment in the Obama Administration and Congressional
Democrats for being “nowhere” on civil liberties (38:41); and his
surprising credit to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) for his epic
filibuster where he read into the Congressional record “for the
first time ever…the names of U.S. citizens killed in operations
authorized by President Obama.” (40:22)

About 41 minutes.