Britain is up to its neck in US dirty wars and death squads | Seumas Milne

The war on terror is now an endless campaign of drone and undercover killings that threatens a more dangerous world

You might have thought the war on terror was finally being wound down, 12 years after the US launched it with such disastrous results. President Obama certainly gave that impression earlier this year when he declared that “this war, like all wars, must end”.

In fact, the Nobel peace prize winner was merely redefining it. There would be no more “boundless global war on terror”, he promised. By which he meant land wars and occupations are out for now, even if the US is still negotiating for troops to remain in Afghanistan after the end of next year.

But the war on terror is mutating, growing and spreading. Drone attacks, which have escalated under Obama from Pakistan to north Africa, are central to this new phase. And as Dirty Wars – the powerful new film by the American journalist Jeremy Scahill – makes clear, so are killings on the ground by covert US special forces, proxy warlords and mercenaries in multiple countries.

Scahill’s film noir-style investigation starts with the massacre of a police commander’s family by a US Joint Special Operations Command (Jsoc) secret unit in Gardez, Afghanistan (initially claimed by the US military to have been honour killings). It then moves through a murderous cruise missile attack in Majala, Yemen, that killed 46 civilians, including 21 children; the drone assassination of the radical US cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son; and the outsourced kidnappings and murders carried out by local warlords on behalf of Jsoc and the CIA in Somalia.

What emerges is both the scale of covert killings by US special forces – running 20 raids a night at one point in Afghanistan – and the unmistakable fact that these units are operating as death squads, whose bloodletting is dressed up as “targeted killings” of terrorists and insurgents for the benefit of a grateful nation back home.

When a Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, demonstrated just how targeted these killings can actually be in practice – by exposing the US slaughter at Majala – he was framed and jailed in Yemen as an al-Qaida collaborator, and his release was initially blocked by the personal intervention of Obama.

Of course, the US and its friends have carried out covert assassinations and sponsored death squads for many years. But assassination and undercover killings, once criticised by the US as an unfortunate Israeli habit, are now a central part of American strategy – and the battlefield has gone global. The number of countries in which the US Special Operations Command is operating has risen from 40 to 120.

And Britain is with them every step of the way. British officials like to present their own drone operations in Afghanistan as a moral cut above those of the CIA and Jsoc. In real life, the collaboration could hardly be closer. This week Noor Khan, whose father …read more