"Dirty Wars," the riveting new documentary by journalist Jeremy Scahill and director Rick Rowley that probes the shadowy world of the most covert arm of the U.S. national security apparatus and offers an investigation into that elite fighting force. It manages to simultaneously delve deeply and authoritatively into the murky world of U.S. counter-terrorism while ultimately posing a series of questions, or perhaps a central dilemma. How do we understand the world around us and our priorities as a nation when we don't even know the breadth of our country's armed forces engagement around the globe?

"Dirty Wars" follows Scahill's investigation of the then-almost unknown JSOC, which takes him from Afghanistan to New York to Yemen to Washington. Scahill interviews former officials with knowledge of the unit's operations who detail how the war in Afghanistan transitioned to one spearheaded by JSOC through targeted killings and strategic, almost surgical attack-and-grab missions. In Yemen, Scahill visits the site of a deadly airstrike, later returning to the country to speak with the father of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric who became the first U.S. citizen to be slated for a targeted killing and to die in the crosshairs of an unmanned drone.

When presented with the enormous, quasi-unanswerable questions about power, war and justice that "Dirty Wars" posits, any viewer's natural reaction might be to simply disengage from the material. Scahill's tenacity, his refusal to disengage from an issue that is disturbing and morally ambiguous even in the face of personal peril and a lack of cooperation from those in the corridors of power, make his reporting--and his analysis of American politics and policy--so compelling. We are certainly not all brave enough to venture into danger in search of the truth. What we can do, though, is pay close attention to those who are.

As "Dirty Wars" demonstrates, once we allow our eyes to be opened, we may discover that we are very blind indeed.