Free Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill Page A

uncles and cousins and two of his grandparents. He was his grandmother’s favorite. When guests visited, he would bring them tea and sweets. When they left, he would clean up after them. Once, his grandmother twisted her ankle and went to the hospital for treatment. When she limped out of the treatment room, the boy was there to greet her and make sure she got home safely. “ You are a gentle boy ,” his grandmother always told him. “Don’t ever change.”
    The boy’s mission was simple: he wanted to find his father. He hadn’t seen him in years and he was afraid that if he didn’t find him, he would be left only with blurred memories: of his father teaching him to fish; to ride a horse; surprising him with an abundance of gifts on his birthday; taking him and his siblings to the beach or to the candy shop.
    Finding his father would not be easy. He was a wanted man. There was a bounty on his head and he had narrowly escaped death more than a dozen times. That powerful forces in multiple countries wanted his father dead did not deter the boy. He was tired of seeing the videos of his father that painted him as a terrorist and an evil figure. He just knew him as his dad, and he wanted at least one last moment with him. But it didn’t work out that way.
    Three weeks after he climbed out the kitchen window, the boy was outdoors with his cousins
—
teenagers like him
—
laying a picnic for dinner beneath the stars. It was then he would have heard the drones approaching, followed by the whiz of the missiles. It was a direct hit. The boy and his cousins were blown to pieces. All that remained of the boy was the back of his head, his flowing hair still clinging to it. The boy had turned sixteen years old a few weeks earlier and now he had been killed by his own government. He was the third US citizen to be killed in operations authorized by the president in two weeks. The first was his father.

17 “A Lot of It Was of Questionable Legality”
    SOURCE: “HUNTER ”—Despite the fact that I began covering US wars in the 1990s, spending extensive time in Yugoslavia and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, JSOC was not on my radar until well after the US occupation of Iraq was under way. I had no sense of the scope of JSOC’s operations or how it interacted (or didn’t) with conventional military units or the CIA. My personal gateway into JSOC was through sources I had developed while working on my investigation into the private military contractor Blackwater, which employed an abundance of former Special Ops men, including many who had worked with JSOC and the CIA. In several of the Blackwater stories I was chasing, JSOC’s name was popping up regularly. As I began investigating what was becoming an increasingly global covert war, I received an electronic communication from a man who could help make sense of this highly secretive world. When we first began communicating, I was a bit paranoid about him. My computer had just been hacked and I had received a series of threatening phone calls and e-mails pertaining to my work on Blackwater and on JSOC. So when he reached out to me, the timing seemed suspicious.
    He presented himself to me as a patriotic American who believed in the Global War on Terror but said he was deeply concerned about the role that Blackwater was playing in it. He had read my book on the company, seen me on TV, and decided to get in touch. Initially, he didn’t say anything about JSOC. We just talked about Blackwater. When I would press him on his own role in various US wars, he would change the subject or be so vague in his descriptions that he could have been almost anyone in any unit. Eventually, after we communicated through encrypted electronic methods for a few months, I came to believe that he was genuinely interested in helping me understand what the JSOC world was about. After we built up trust, he told me he would talk to me