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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

HARTMANN: We are so pleased to have with us, Jeremy Scahill, the author of ‘Dirty Wars’. He is the New York Times bestselling author of ‘Blackwater’. He is with us today for our ‘Conversations with Great Minds’ series. Jeremy, welcome.

SCAHILL: I don’t know if my mind is that great, but I’m honored to be with you Thom.

HARTMANN: Your mind is that great and ‘Blackwater’ was a brilliant book and you’ve outdone yourself with ‘Dirty Wars’. This is really an extraordinary piece of work. Let’s start out with just the title of the book, ‘Dirty Wars’. Why that phrase?

SCAHILL: Yeah, I mean I wasn’t trying to be a master of the obvious. You don’t even have to have covered a war to know that all wars are dirty. It was sort of a response to the notion that’s been put forward by some members of the Obama Administration that Obama is waging a ‘clean’ war, that our drone strikes are just taking out the bad guys and that the number of civilians killed is minimal. But what is more important to me is as a kind of reference to a series of dirty wars that you yourself have covered extensively and written about and that is what the US was doing in Central America in the 1980s in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala where we were getting in bed with right wing dictatorships or we were funding death squads in the form of the Contras along with all sorts of other covert actions . . .

HARTMANN: And in the 50’s and 60’s in the Middle East.

SCAHILL: Right. In the 50’s and 60’s in the Middle East and in Africa as well. You had the murder of Patrice Lumumba in Congo and you had the overthrow of Salvador Allende. One of the first things the CIA did of course was in ’54, overthrow Jacobo Arbenz.

Listen to the rest of Jeremy Scahill’s interview with Thom Hartmann.

Thom’s Guest: Jeremy Scahill is the National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine and author of the international bestseller ‘Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army’. His new book is ‘Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield’.

Take a look at the ‘Dirty Wars’ website.

SONALI KOLHATKAR IS ON MATERNITY LEAVE.