In the wake of the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, will the US alter its strategy in the ‘War on Terror’? A number of our more progressive House members have sent a letter to President Obama urging him to significantly scale back troop levels in Afghanistan no later than this July. The public has turned against the war in Afghanistan, they argue, and now is the time to leave. But others are taking a rather different lesson from bin Laden’s death: why not pursue more targets for assassination? The pundits and politicians advocating this kill-for-peace strategy are even arguing that we couldn’t have tracked down bin Laden without the intelligence extracted through torture and waterboarding. Could this mean more missions for the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite military unit that killed bin Laden? On this week’s edition of The Breakdown, The Nation‘s Jeremy Scahill joins DC editor Chris Hayes to explain how JSOC has become so enmeshed in US strategy for the ‘War on Terror’ and why this raises a host of pressing legal and moral questions.
Further Reading:
Jeremy Scahill’s Nation article on JSOC, “The Black Ops Force That Took Down Bin Laden”
Chris Hayes’s Nation article on the dangerously simplistic US foreign policy worldview, “After Osama bin Laden’s Death, An End to ‘Bad Guys’”
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