If you caught John Oliver’s recent rant against drone strikes (above) and want to hear a more sober take on the matter, you’ll want to get to Bushwick’s Mayday Space next Thursday, when investigative reporter and war correspondent Jeremy Scahill will celebrate the paperback publication of Dirty Wars, his blistering indictment of the Obama administration’s ever expanding war on terror and its reliance on drones, targeted killings, and covert operations.
If you haven’t read the book, you should hit Netflix and see the documentary of the same name, in which Scahill investigates strikes that killed civilians and concludes that the war on terror is making more enemies than it is taking out terrorists.
Scahill is kind of a hero among those who believe the mainstream media hasn’t investigated or criticized Obama’s foreign policy enough. He’ll be joined by his similarly lauded colleagues at The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the journalists to whom Edward Snowden leaked classified documents that exposed unsettling details about the NSA’s surveillance programs.
Expect them to explain the troubling relationship between those programs and drone strikes, in the same way The Intercept’s first feature did. That report began: “The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.”
Hey, that’s how we roll.
Thursday, Oct. 9, 7 p.m. at Mayday Space, 214 Starr St., bet. Wyckoff and Irving Sts., Bushwick.