
America's Secret Killers
The raid that killed Osama bin Laden was the visible tip of a much larger campaign, and this Dispatches investigation goes after the part of the Afghanistan war that stayed classified: the night raids and kill lists run by US special forces against Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Reporters piece together how targets get chosen, who signs off on a strike, and what happens when the intelligence is wrong, using interviews with former operators, military officials, and Afghans who describe raids on their homes and villages. The programme calls it precision targeting; the people it lands on call it assassination, and the film sets those two accounts against each other without flinching from either. It traces the chain of command from Washington's targeting committees down to soldiers on the ground carrying out orders in the dark, and asks what accountability looks like for a war fought largely out of public view. The result is a sober account of a policy that outlasted the men who designed it.