As he travels the world reporting on the United States government's targeted killing program, Jeremy Scahill has often been moved to apologise: to the mothers of children blown to pieces by cruise missiles in southern Yemen, to the husbands of women shot dead by special forces commandos in Afghanistan, and to the grandfather of a teenage boy, apparently executed without explanation for an act of terrorism he might one day commit. ''I might be the only American these people will ever meet. I know they're not going to get an apology from the US government,'' he says. ''So as a person from the United States, it's important that someone from our society say, 'We're sorry that this happened'.'' Scahill's book Dirty Wars is a thorough account of how extrajudicial assassinations became a core element of America's national security policy. The accompanying film, which is being shown at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Monday, follows Scahill to wherever the ''global war on terror'' is being fought, as he uncovers a vast, multifaceted shadow military, operating with minimal oversight, beyond the limits of international law. The book explains how this system came into being under President George W. Bush and was extended by President Barack Obama, with bipartisan support in Congress and barely a dissenting whisper in the American media. Of all the shocks in Dirty Wars, none is more profound than the realisation that killing thousands of people far from any theatre of war has been almost universally accepted in the US as a justifiable response to the threat of terrorism. Bill Roggio, whose Long War Journal keeps track of military actions against Islamist groups, told me: ''As a citizen, I look at this and say, 'We're killing senior members of al-Qaeda, there haven't been any attacks in the US, therefore it's an effective strategy'.'' In a recent NBC News poll, 66 per cent of respondents said they supported the use of drones to kill suspected terrorists. Only 16 per cent were opposed. The force responsible for most of these targeted killings, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), is set up to operate independently of the military command structure, reporting directly to the President. Its activities are defined as ''preparing the battle space'' and thus subject to little congressional oversight. The New York Times recently reported that JSOC troops had deployed to 70 countries in the past decade, and that it employs 66,000 staff, including private defence contractors, at a cost of $10.5 billion per year. Because so much of the information about what JSOC does is classified, an accurate accounting of casualties is impossible. Using local reports from Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the three countries where the battle against al-Qaeda-aligned militants is fiercest, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has estimated that the United States has killed between 3233 and 5228 people in missile strikes and covert military operations since 2002. In Afghanistan, in late 2010, Scahill met Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban spokesman, who told him special forces raids were ''encouraging the people to become extremist … If you are killing five people, 20, at least, are rising against you.'' In Somalia, where he has travelled extensively, he witnessed how the struggle against al-Shabab militants has been outsourced to warlords with track records for killing civilians, and private defence contractors, including AECOM Technology Corporation, Hart Security, DynCorp, Bancroft and Threat Management Group. In Yemen, last year, at the site of a strike on a Bedouin village that killed more than 40 people in December 2009, a local tribal leader, Muqbal, told Scahill: ''If they kill innocent children and call them al-Qaeda, then we are all al-Qaeda.'' Although survivors found Tomahawk missile parts labelled ''Made in the USA'', the United States government has never admitted responsibility for the strike. In a leaked cable, Yemen's then president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, told General David Petraeus: ''We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.'' The Obama administration's legal reasoning for operations that target an American citizen - it admits killing four, to date - is laid out in a US Department of Justice white paper, which argues that a ''well-informed high-level administration official'' can determine whether a target presents an imminent threat to the United States. Under a ''broader concept of imminence'', the government does not need evidence of a specific terrorist plot, to conduct a ''lawful killing in self-defence'' anywhere in the world. ''The US is sending a message to China, Russia, Iran, nations the world over, that assassinating your opponents outside of the norms of international laws and conventions is acceptable, as long as you assert that it's acceptable,'' says Scahill. At regular White House meetings - as reported by The New York Times - known as ''terror Tuesdays'' senior officials discuss ''nominations'' to the CIA and JSOC kill lists. Chris Woods, from the BIJ, told me: ''At its heart this is a political decision taken by the President. When you have a machine that we're told has a thousand-plus names on it at any one time, designated for assassination, that's really worrying territory.'' A recently leaked Pakistani government document named 746 people killed by drones between 2006 and late 2009, including 147 civilians, 94 of whom were children. As Fairfax Media exclusively revealed last month, many of these strikes will have been targeted from the US-Australian intelligence facility at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, which provides ''real-time tracking and geolocation'' for operations to ''capture or kill high-value targets''. Scahill lives in Brooklyn, New York. We met on the day a royal heir was born in London, and the parade of ecstatic reporters outside St Mary's hospital, on every network, provided fitting background chatter for a discussion about moral and legal issues that have been largely ignored by mainstream American news organisations. The first and last time most Americans heard about special forces death squads was when Navy SEALs took out Osama bin Laden in May 2011. ''The fact that Disney tried to trademark 'Seal Team Six' is the perfect metaphor for how the bin Laden raid was used by the White House,'' Scahill says. ''What people don't know about the broader force, the Joint Special Operations Command, is that they've been involved with repeated incidents where civilians have been killed, where actions have been taken that quite possibly will result in blowback against the United States. That's almost totally undiscussed.'' In February 2010, Scahill was in Kabul, Afghanistan. Official military reports mentioned night raids against insurgents, but there were never any details and they took place in ''denied areas'' under Taliban control. After hearing about an attack that had gone terribly wrong, he travelled to Gardez, in Paktia province, to see for himself. The NATO press release said a ''security force'' was on patrol near the village of Khataba when ''several insurgents'' opened fire. After killing the enemy fighters, soldiers entered the compound and made a ''gruesome discovery'' - three women bound, gagged and executed in an apparent honour killing. The women's relatives told a different story, and showed Scahill videos on their mobile phones to back it up. Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin, a police intelligence officer, was celebrating the birth of his son at a house party with music, food and dancing. When the power was cut at 3.30am, he went outside with his 15-year-old son to investigate. Both were immediately shot. After the family heard their attackers speaking English, Daoud's brother went to remonstrate with them. Three of the women tried to restrain him. The snipers gunned them down too, then burst into the house and handcuffed the survivors. The men were hooded, shackled and flown to a holding facility, where they were interrogated for several days. Another of Daoud's brothers, Mohammed Sabir, told Scahill he witnessed US soldiers digging bullets out of the women's bodies. When this was confirmed by an Afghan government investigation, the cover-up fell apart. The commander of JSOC, Admiral William McRaven, flew to Gardez to accept responsibility for the raid, apologise and pay compensation. Scahill began to investigate the shadow war being waged in Afghanistan and discovered that United States troops were carrying out up to a thousand night raids each month, many of which inflicted civilian casualties. Special forces often didn't even notify NATO commanders about when and where raids would be taking place. JSOC's Australian counterpart, the Special Operations Task Force, will remain in Afghanistan after the majority of Australia's troops come home later this year. In June, Corporal Cameron Stewart Baird was killed in a firefight with Taliban insurgents, becoming the 40th Australian casualty of the war. On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underwear. Former vice-president Dick Cheney accused the administration of being soft on terrorism. ''President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war,'' he said. In fact, although the Bush administration had created the legal and organisational framework for extrajudicial killing, Obama had expanded it, and had kept many of its key architects, including McRaven, John Brennan, General Stanley McChrystal and General David Petraeus in powerful positions. Obama authorised more drone strikes in his first 10 months in office than Bush did in eight years. He had also just approved a Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, signed by Petraeus, that gave special forces increased scope to operate anywhere in the world without presidential approval. ''I think the enduring legacy of President Obama on this front is that he worked very hard to legitimise the program and to sell it as a perfectly legal practice by the United States,'' Scahill says. ''Behind the scenes, they've created this 'disposition matrix', which is like an algorithm for determining who should be killed, who can be captured, who do we want to try. The fact that Obama put his stamp of legitimacy on this guarantees it's going to continue on at least through the next couple of administrations.'' In Dirty Wars, the book and the film, Scahill focuses on the case of radical Islamist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman, two US citizens who were blown up in separate operations two weeks apart in Yemen. The New York Times recently published an op-ed by Abdulrahman's grandfather, Nasser. ''The government has killed a 16-year-old American boy,'' it read. ''Shouldn't it at least have to explain why?'' On Friday, a federal judge, Rosemary Collyer, said she was ''really troubled'' by the administration's position that the courts have no role to play in determining the legality of drone strikes. When government lawyer Brian Hauck noted that the White House reviews operations that target American citizens, Collyer replied, ''No, no, no, no, no. The executive is not an effective check on the executive.'' She has yet to rule on the government's motion to dismiss the al-Awlaki family's lawsuit. The CIA denied that it killed Abdulrahman, suggesting the strike was a JSOC operation. The details are classified, so it remains unclear whether the boy, who had never been linked with terrorism, was targeted deliberately. The only other victims of the attack were his teenage cousins. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told CNN: ''The American citizens who have been killed overseas … are terrorists, and, frankly, if anyone in the world deserved to be killed, those three did deserve to be killed.'' Woods pointed out that, for the time being, China and Russia ''have taken a strategic decision that there's no value to them of getting involved in a targeted killing program. But what happens in five years' or 10 years' time? The US has effectively established a rule book which clears the ground for targeted killings. We're not just talking drones, we're talking targeted assassinations in any form, whether it's murdering your political opponents on the streets of London, sinking a boat in international waters or whatever.'' In his much-heralded speech at National Defence University, in May, Obama announced new targeting guidelines. ''This war, like all wars, must end. That's what history advises. It's what our democracy demands,'' he said. ''A perpetual war - through drones or special forces or troop deployments - will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.'' His rhetoric was greeted with great scepticism by human rights groups. Five days later, a Lockheed Martin Hellfire missile tore into a house in Waziristan, killing seven suspected militants. Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement noting ''the drone strikes are counterproductive, entail loss of innocent civilian lives, have human rights and humanitarian implications and violate the principles of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international law''. ''I do think that, particularly in Yemen, we're making more enemies than we are killing terrorists,'' Scahill says. ''And those new enemies are not necessarily terrorists at all - they're people with a legitimate score to settle.'' The film Dirty Wars screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Monday.Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill is published in Australia by Serpent's Tail ($29.99).

As he travels the world reporting on the United States government's targeted killing program, Jeremy Scahill has often been moved to apologise: to the mothers of children blown to pieces by cruise missiles in southern Yemen, to the husbands of women shot dead by special forces commandos in Afghanistan, and to the grandfather of a teenage boy, apparently executed without explanation for an act of terrorism he might one day commit. ''I might be the only American these people will ever meet. I know they're not going to get an apology from the US government,'' he says. ''So as a person from the United States, it's important that someone from our society say, 'We're sorry that this happened'.'' Scahill's book Dirty Wars is a thorough account of how extrajudicial assassinations became a core element of America's national security policy. The accompanying film, which is being shown at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Monday, follows Scahill to wherever the ''global war on terror'' is being fought, as he uncovers a vast, multifaceted shadow military, operating with minimal oversight, beyond the limits of international law. The book explains how this system came into being under President George W. Bush and was extended by President Barack Obama, with bipartisan support in Congress and barely a dissenting whisper in the American media. Of all the shocks in Dirty Wars, none is more profound than the realisation that killing thousands of people far from any theatre of war has been almost universally accepted in the US as a justifiable response to the threat of terrorism. Bill Roggio, whose Long War Journal keeps track of military actions against Islamist groups, told me: ''As a citizen, I look at this and say, 'We're killing senior members of al-Qaeda, there haven't been any attacks in the US, therefore it's an effective strategy'.'' In a recent NBC News poll, 66 per cent of respondents said they supported the use of drones to kill suspected terrorists. Only 16 per cent were opposed. The force responsible for most of these targeted killings, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), is set up to operate independently of the military command structure, reporting directly to the President. Its activities are defined as ''preparing the battle space'' and thus subject to little congressional oversight. The New York Times recently reported that JSOC troops had deployed to 70 countries in the past decade, and that it employs 66,000 staff, including private defence contractors, at a cost of $10.5 billion per year. Because so much of the information about what JSOC does is classified, an accurate accounting of casualties is impossible. Using local reports from Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the three countries where the battle against al-Qaeda-aligned militants is fiercest, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has estimated that the United States has killed between 3233 and 5228 people in missile strikes and covert military operations since 2002. In Afghanistan, in late 2010, Scahill met Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban spokesman, who told him special forces raids were ''encouraging the people to become extremist … If you are killing five people, 20, at least, are rising against you.'' In Somalia, where he has travelled extensively, he witnessed how the struggle against al-Shabab militants has been outsourced to warlords with track records for killing civilians, and private defence contractors, including AECOM Technology Corporation, Hart Security, DynCorp, Bancroft and Threat Management Group. In Yemen, last year, at the site of a strike on a Bedouin village that killed more than 40 people in December 2009, a local tribal leader, Muqbal, told Scahill: ''If they kill innocent children and call them al-Qaeda, then we are all al-Qaeda.'' Although survivors found Tomahawk missile parts labelled ''Made in the USA'', the United States government has never admitted responsibility for the strike. In a leaked cable, Yemen's then president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, told General David Petraeus: ''We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.'' The Obama administration's legal reasoning for operations that target an American citizen - it admits killing four, to date - is laid out in a US Department of Justice white paper, which argues that a ''well-informed high-level administration official'' can determine whether a target presents an imminent threat to the United States. Under a ''broader concept of imminence'', the government does not need evidence of a specific terrorist plot, to conduct a ''lawful killing in self-defence'' anywhere in the world. ''The US is sending a message to China, Russia, Iran, nations the world over, that assassinating your opponents outside of the norms of international laws and conventions is acceptable, as long as you assert that it's acceptable,'' says Scahill. At regular White House meetings - as reported by The New York Times - known as ''terror Tuesdays'' senior officials discuss ''nominations'' to the CIA and JSOC kill lists. Chris Woods, from the BIJ, told me: ''At its heart this is a political decision taken by the President. When you have a machine that we're told has a thousand-plus names on it at any one time, designated for assassination, that's really worrying territory.'' A recently leaked Pakistani government document named 746 people killed by drones between 2006 and late 2009, including 147 civilians, 94 of whom were children. As Fairfax Media exclusively revealed last month, many of these strikes will have been targeted from the US-Australian intelligence facility at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, which provides ''real-time tracking and geolocation'' for operations to ''capture or kill high-value targets''. Scahill lives in Brooklyn, New York. We met on the day a royal heir was born in London, and the parade of ecstatic reporters outside St Mary's hospital, on every network, provided fitting background chatter for a discussion about moral and legal issues that have been largely ignored by mainstream American news organisations. The first and last time most Americans heard about special forces death squads was when Navy SEALs took out Osama bin Laden in May 2011. ''The fact that Disney tried to trademark 'Seal Team Six' is the perfect metaphor for how the bin Laden raid was used by the White House,'' Scahill says. ''What people don't know about the broader force, the Joint Special Operations Command, is that they've been involved with repeated incidents where civilians have been killed, where actions have been taken that quite possibly will result in blowback against the United States. That's almost totally undiscussed.'' In February 2010, Scahill was in Kabul, Afghanistan. Official military reports mentioned night raids against insurgents, but there were never any details and they took place in ''denied areas'' under Taliban control. After hearing about an attack that had gone terribly wrong, he travelled to Gardez, in Paktia province, to see for himself. The NATO press release said a ''security force'' was on patrol near the village of Khataba when ''several insurgents'' opened fire. After killing the enemy fighters, soldiers entered the compound and made a ''gruesome discovery'' - three women bound, gagged and executed in an apparent honour killing. The women's relatives told a different story, and showed Scahill videos on their mobile phones to back it up. Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin, a police intelligence officer, was celebrating the birth of his son at a house party with music, food and dancing. When the power was cut at 3.30am, he went outside with his 15-year-old son to investigate. Both were immediately shot. After the family heard their attackers speaking English, Daoud's brother went to remonstrate with them. Three of the women tried to restrain him. The snipers gunned them down too, then burst into the house and handcuffed the survivors. The men were hooded, shackled and flown to a holding facility, where they were interrogated for several days. Another of Daoud's brothers, Mohammed Sabir, told Scahill he witnessed US soldiers digging bullets out of the women's bodies. When this was confirmed by an Afghan government investigation, the cover-up fell apart. The commander of JSOC, Admiral William McRaven, flew to Gardez to accept responsibility for the raid, apologise and pay compensation. Scahill began to investigate the shadow war being waged in Afghanistan and discovered that United States troops were carrying out up to a thousand night raids each month, many of which inflicted civilian casualties. Special forces often didn't even notify NATO commanders about when and where raids would be taking place. JSOC's Australian counterpart, the Special Operations Task Force, will remain in Afghanistan after the majority of Australia's troops come home later this year. In June, Corporal Cameron Stewart Baird was killed in a firefight with Taliban insurgents, becoming the 40th Australian casualty of the war. On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underwear. Former vice-president Dick Cheney accused the administration of being soft on terrorism. ''President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war,'' he said. In fact, although the Bush administration had created the legal and organisational framework for extrajudicial killing, Obama had expanded it, and had kept many of its key architects, including McRaven, John Brennan, General Stanley McChrystal and General David Petraeus in powerful positions. Obama authorised more drone strikes in his first 10 months in office than Bush did in eight years. He had also just approved a Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, signed by Petraeus, that gave special forces increased scope to operate anywhere in the world without presidential approval. ''I think the enduring legacy of President Obama on this front is that he worked very hard to legitimise the program and to sell it as a perfectly legal practice by the United States,'' Scahill says. ''Behind the scenes, they've created this 'disposition matrix', which is like an algorithm for determining who should be killed, who can be captured, who do we want to try. The fact that Obama put his stamp of legitimacy on this guarantees it's going to continue on at least through the next couple of administrations.'' In Dirty Wars, the book and the film, Scahill focuses on the case of radical Islamist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman, two US citizens who were blown up in separate operations two weeks apart in Yemen. The New York Times recently published an op-ed by Abdulrahman's grandfather, Nasser. ''The government has killed a 16-year-old American boy,'' it read. ''Shouldn't it at least have to explain why?'' On Friday, a federal judge, Rosemary Collyer, said she was ''really troubled'' by the administration's position that the courts have no role to play in determining the legality of drone strikes. When government lawyer Brian Hauck noted that the White House reviews operations that target American citizens, Collyer replied, ''No, no, no, no, no. The executive is not an effective check on the executive.'' She has yet to rule on the government's motion to dismiss the al-Awlaki family's lawsuit. The CIA denied that it killed Abdulrahman, suggesting the strike was a JSOC operation. The details are classified, so it remains unclear whether the boy, who had never been linked with terrorism, was targeted deliberately. The only other victims of the attack were his teenage cousins. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told CNN: ''The American citizens who have been killed overseas … are terrorists, and, frankly, if anyone in the world deserved to be killed, those three did deserve to be killed.'' Woods pointed out that, for the time being, China and Russia ''have taken a strategic decision that there's no value to them of getting involved in a targeted killing program. But what happens in five years' or 10 years' time? The US has effectively established a rule book which clears the ground for targeted killings. We're not just talking drones, we're talking targeted assassinations in any form, whether it's murdering your political opponents on the streets of London, sinking a boat in international waters or whatever.'' In his much-heralded speech at National Defence University, in May, Obama announced new targeting guidelines. ''This war, like all wars, must end. That's what history advises. It's what our democracy demands,'' he said. ''A perpetual war - through drones or special forces or troop deployments - will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways.'' His rhetoric was greeted with great scepticism by human rights groups. Five days later, a Lockheed Martin Hellfire missile tore into a house in Waziristan, killing seven suspected militants. Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement noting ''the drone strikes are counterproductive, entail loss of innocent civilian lives, have human rights and humanitarian implications and violate the principles of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and international law''. ''I do think that, particularly in Yemen, we're making more enemies than we are killing terrorists,'' Scahill says. ''And those new enemies are not necessarily terrorists at all - they're people with a legitimate score to settle.'' The film Dirty Wars screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Monday.

Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill is published in Australia by Serpent's Tail ($29.99). This story Drones are a dirty business first appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald.