Friday, June 5, 2020

Drone, a Norwegian-made documentary: “We just made orphans out of all these children” - World Socialist Web Site

Drone, a Norwegian-made documentary: “We just made orphans out of all these children” - World Socialist Web Site





Drone, a Norwegian-made documentary: “We just made orphans out of all these children”
By Joanne Laurier
29 January 2016

Directed by Tonje Hessen Schei

Drone, directed by Norwegian filmmaker Tonje Hessen Schei, about the illegal CIA drone program, has been screened at various documentary film festivals and played in certain theaters in North America.

The use of drones by the United States for purposes of assassinations has greatly increased over the past decade. Hessen Schei’s movie brings together opponents of this specialized killing tool, including authors, commentators, human rights attorneys and investigative journalists.

The real heart and strength of Drone lies in its interviews with two former drone operators from the US Air Force, Brandon Bryant and Michael Haas, both young men suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Bryant and Haas served in time periods that straddled the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. One of Bryant’s entries in his diary: “On the battlefield there are no sides, just bloodshed. Total war. Every horror witnessed. I wish my eyes would rot.”

Hessen Schei presents images and stories focusing on the northwestern Pakistani province of Waziristan, a region that has been a particular target of homicidal American drone bombing.

Reprieve, the British human rights organization whose founder, Clive Stafford Smith, is interviewed in the film, points out: “To date, the United States has used drones to execute without trial some 4,700 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia—all countries against whom it has not declared war. The US’ drones programme is a covert war being carried out by the CIA.”

In the documentary, Chris Woods, author of Sudden Justice, further observes that “nowhere has been more bombed by the CIA than Waziristan. The first recorded CIA done strike in Pakistan took place in 2004. The number of those strikes has accelerated.” He calls it “an industrialized killing program.”

In Waziristan, a young drone strike survivor, Zubair Ur Rehman, shyly tells the camera that “the drones circulate 24 hours a day. Two or three at a time. Always two, but often three or four. When we hear the sound of the drones, we get scared. We can’t work, play or go to school. It is only when it’s cloudy that we don’t hear the drones.”

The barbaric strikes, which have increased sharply under the Obama administration, are illegal under international and US law and amount to war crimes. In the Hessen Schei film, Pakistani photojournalist Noor Behram displays his dossier of devastating photographs of child victims of drone attacks: “Every time I sleep, I hear the cries of the children.”

Dronealso deals with the attacks on the would-be rescuers of the victims of the drone strikes. This is what the American military refers to as a “double tap.” Missiles are launched, killing and injuring people. Moments later, when nearby residents race to the scene to help the wounded, another round of missiles is fired. As one analyst points out, the US government, in many cases, has no idea whom they are killing.

Imran Khan, Chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, affirms that “when people gather round to save the injured [from a drone strike], there’s another drone attack! ... You can hear the cries of the injured for hours because no one goes to help them.”

Another of the movie’s commentators emphasizes, “It’s never been easier for an American president to carry out killing operations at the ends of the earth … and when you define the world as a battlefield, it’s a very broad range of operations you can carry out.”

According to Woods: “You’ve got the president signing off on particular death lists; you have the US Air Force flying the drones; the Central Intelligence Agency responsible for the strikes; CENTCOM [United States Central Command] involved in launching and targeting of strikes; NSA [National Security Agency] providing intelligence for strikes … the entire apparatus of the United States government has been bent towards the process of targeted killings over the past decade.”

As a means of recruiting drone pilots, the military has developed “militainment”—war presented as entertainment. In the warped minds of the armed forces’ top brass, video gamers have skill sets that it values.

Former drone operator Bryant, who served as a sensor operator for the Predator program from 2007 to 2011, movingly explains that “I didn’t really understand what it meant to kill at first. … We sat in a box for nearly 12-hour shifts. … We’re the ultimate voyeurs. The ultimate Peeping Toms. No one is going to catch us. We’re getting orders to take these peoples’ lives. It was just a point and click.”

One of Drone’s interviewed experts argues the more distant the perpetrator is from the victim, the crueler the act of killing. The separation in space creates and encourages indifference. He refers to “the psychology of distance.”

Haas, who served in the US military from 2005 to 2011, participated in targeted killing runs from his computer at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada that ended the lives of insurgents and others in Afghanistan some 8,000 miles away: “I joined when I was barely 20 years old. I did not know what I was in for. I thought it was the coolest damn thing in the world. Play video games all day and then the reality hits you that you may have to kill somebody.

“In our control room, they had a picture of the September 11 [2001] plane hitting the second [World Trade Center] building. They make you pissed off all over again just before you go do your job. ‘These guys have to die. These guys deserve to die.’ And you’ve got to make it happen.”

As opposed to the remorse felt by the former airmen, Andy Von Flotow, chairman of Insitu, which builds unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the state of Washington, was in on the ground floor in the development of drones. He boasts that “we started this unmanned aircraft business in the early 1990s, shortly after GPS made it possible.” His company built a small airplane with a camera on it in 1999 to help tuna fisherman. While the fishermen did not buy the planes, “George Bush took us into his adventures.” Flotow claims that “we have 25 percent of unmanned flight hours in Iraq and Afghanistan. … War is an opportunity to do business.”

One of the most intense moments in the film occurs when Bryant opens up to the filmmakers: “I didn’t really understand what it meant to kill at first. It was horrible. The first time was horrible. The second time was horrible. The third time was numbing. The fourth time was numbing. But of course the first time sticks with you the longest [he describes the procedure]. … Then I watched this man bleed out … and I imagined his last moments. I knew I had ended something I had no right to end. I swore an oath, I did what I was supposed to do. I followed through with it. … It was like an image of myself was cracking up and breaking apart.”

Earlier in the film, he says: “Over the last five and one half years, 1,626 people were killed in the operations I took part in. … When I looked at that number, I was ready to put a bullet in my brain.”

Fellow drone operator Haas discloses that “you never knew who you were killing because you never actually see a face—just silhouettes and it’s easy to have that detachment and that lack of sympathy for human life. And it’s easy just to think of them as something else. They’re not really people, they’re just terrorists.” His military superiors, he remarks, “don’t have to take that shot or bear the burden—I’m the one who has to bear that burden. They don’t have to do the actions or live with the repercussions … and we just made orphans out of all these children. They don’t have to live with that. I do.”

The CIA drones program is global assassination without trial. The operations of this state-run murder machine are kept shrouded in secrecy by the Obama administration. While the outlook of the creators of Drone is not strong—essentially consisting of appeals to the United Nations and the Pakistani government—the movie provides further insight into the lawless and ruthless character of US foreign policy.


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  • To use a phrase from Antonin Scalia: “You are kidding yourself” if you think the US military brass doesn't have a scenario in mind in which they would use these drones on first world countries...including their own.
    (I'll link to that article - it's a dire warning of what the ruling class has in store for us if we don't stop them: http://www.wsws.org/en/arti... )
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        The real heart and strength is most certainly NOT Brandon Bryant. That guy is a pathological liar.
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            Oh and it gets better:
            Tell us more about how drone operators don't get PTSD, you sound like a super compassionate and understanding dude.
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                I'm not sure what compassion has to do with this. A lie is a lie. If you don't think Brandon is a liar then you're not paying attention.
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                    I say that he's a liar and provide evidence and you don't take that on. Instead you make unsupported and false claims about me supporting imperialism. If you can't beat an argument, I guess change the conversation, no?
                    If you want to rally behind a liar who will say anything, well, don't be shocked when you are misinformed.
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                        Look, it's very obvious how my posts directly related to your campaign of character assassination, which as I said, is part of what seems to be your overall perspective of tweaking minor aspects of US imperialism (from within the Air Force no less.) You turn reality on its head, claiming that I'm "changing the conversation" when I'm clearly addressing the basic thrust of your argument head on.
                        Again: You claim he's a liar. A commenter in that reddit thread (we suppose also in the armed forces) notes that confabulation is associated with PTSD. To which you respond with a callous dismissal that drone operators don't get PTSD. The claim is all the more disgusting because it is obviously empirically false if you've ever bothered to look into the matter. So he changed (frankly unimportant) details about the basic fact the FBI got in touch with him. This is pretty simple - why would he change his story? So far, you've far from satisfied the burden of proof that he's a liar.
                        Finally, there is the question of imperialism. In the socialist tradition, this has a specific meaning. Imperialism refers to a historical epoch in the development of capitalism, emerging roughly around the late 19th century, associated with the emergence of increasingly global production concentrated in large transnational monopolies, growth of financial parasitism, a "revolving door" between big business and government, and hence, the tendency of Great Powers to carry out a predatory foreign policy to ensure access to raw materials and markets.
                        Historically, this lead to two world wars. There is much more to this very complex subject, but this is the thumbnail sketch. The same basic drives that lead to conflict in the 20th century continue to exist in the 21st. It has nothing to with "human nature" and everything to do with the breakdown of capitalism.
                        I think it's fitting to quote Smedley Butler, an ex-Marine general, who frankly admitted in his famous essay "War is a Racket" that he had acted as "a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."
                        He continued: "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
                        Imperialism is not a question of policy decisions. It is the nature of the dynamics of modern capitalism. Carrying out limited policy
                        tweaks on how best to prosecute the phony War on Terror,
                        what a "sensible" drone policy would look like, how to proceed with
                        intervention in Syria, how best to rattle sabers in the South China Sea
                        and risk the break out of war - none of this changes the essentially
                        imperialist character of the United States because it ignores the organic connection between the drive to war and the capitalist system.
                          see more
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                      Guy, guys - let's listen to this Air Force officer who writes a blog about how best to implement policy tweaks for American imperialism, and whose Disqus account is basically devoted to character assassination of one of the interviewees in a much-needed documentary on the barbarism of drone warfare.
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                        I wish to point out that Netflix USA has this on streaming right now!
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                            Every Tuesday morning , Obama has his weekly kill sessions to determine (in collusion with the CIA, which supplies the target list) who gets droned that week . He is the ultimate desktop murderer . Every Tuesday morning.....

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