UNMANNED: America’s Drone Wars

Peter Olive, musician and composer and also teaches Latin and Greek

commentary by by Peter Olive
UNMANNED: America’s Drone Wars, a new film Jemima Khan has co-produced, has one simple objective: to expose the lie that no innocent victims have been killed by drones.  Featuring numerous interviews from civilians in the Waziristan region (Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan) as well as academics, researchers and a drone pilot, the film achieves its objective with horrifying clarity.

The bureau of investigative journalism believes that in fact 168 children have been killed by drones – so far.  The film explains how these crimes have remained so shrouded in secrecy: for a start, it so happens that the area in which droning is most frequently taking place is very inaccessible, making it hard for journalists to cover the story.  Eyewitness accounts are few, and numbers of victims hard to establish.  (A cursory look at Wikipedia’s entry on drone strikes, peppered with approximations, e.g “6-12 killed”, “at least 19 dead” gives the same impression.)  Meanwhile in the States, high level authorities assure the American public that no civilians are killed, with little assurance offered about who actually is being killed, or why. The ‘war on terror’ is and has always been covert, its targets never of very certain identity. If they are even real (like those ‘weapons of mass destruction’ George Bush assured us about) they are inseparable from lies concocted in Washington, wild assumptions presented as truth.  The film succeeds in showing us that the CIA have very little idea who they are killing in Waziristan.

The documentary focuses on Tariq, who was allegedly “supporting Al Quaeda’s facilitating network”.  He was a boy of 16.  His interests were football and pop music. Khan’s film shows us the misery of his family and community.  They are incredulous, terrified and bewildered by drone attacks.  They cannot understand why the US thinks a 16 year old boy interested in football and Lady Gaga needs blowing up.  Why does America think their citizens have anything to do with terrorism?

I spoke to Jennifer, a lawyer from Reprieve, at the party after the screening.  She told me about the CIA mentality behind this kind of action, explaining that the research used to establish the targets is often based only on “Pattern of Surveillance”: the suspect is followed and watched.  Supposedly, the behaviour of terrorists is consistent and predictable – so, it is alleged, it is possible to identify terrorists simply by watching them.  These are called “signature strikes”: not based on names or identity, just behaviour.

Drones are supposedly justified in the war on terror on the basis that they use precision technology. This much is true: drone pilot Brandon Bryant corroborates the facts suggested in George Brant’s play Grounded (reviewed on this blog) that is possible to read number plates on cars quite accurately from the cameras aboard a drone.  It is not the technology which is lacking in precision – but the military intelligence, which is little more than supposition. Pilots in fact have no idea who those they’re targeting (with such precision, ironically) are.  Pilot Bryant relates a strike he set up in which, he is told, a dog was killed.  He’s certain it was actually a child.  Like the pilot of Grounded, he is suffering post traumatic stress.  He’s been forced to kill a man (who in fact died slowly, his legs blown off) and has no idea why.

Jennifer also explained that it is quite standard after a droning to wait for those who come to the rescue of terrorists. The assumption is made that anyone who comes to help the target must also be a sympathiser with terrorism.  Most shockingly of all, a drone is sometimes kept in the area to await its victim’s funeral, so they can exterminate the entire community who attend.  All terrorists too, they assume.

Later in the film, academics point out that if this kind of action weren’t reprehensible on moral grounds, common sense would point out its strategic absurdity: if terrorist plots against the US don’t exist already, America’s scapegoat killing of men, women and children in these areas is actively inviting them.  Faisal Shahzad, who tried to bomb Times Square in New York in 2010, said explictly that his motive was the CIA’s repeated drone attacks on Pakistan.  The CIA is being taken to court for war crimes, and there is growing enmity against America in Waziristan. No doubt the US will consider this justification enough to continue the practice.  The UK, too, is complicit.  Ever obsequious to the States, our surrender of information from GCHQ enables the CIA to cite our findings as “intelligence” in the war on terror – which this film exposes as nothing of the kind.

November 2013 marks ten years since George Bush began the ‘war on terror’.  I hope this film will succeed in raising public recognition about the nonsensical criminality being perpetrated by the United States.