drone encounters: noor behram, omer fast, and visual critiques of drone warfare

Drone Encounters: Noor Behram, Omer Fast, and Visual Critiquesof Drone Warfare

Matt Delmont

American Quarterly, Volume 65, Number 1, March 2013, pp. 193-202 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0002

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| 193Visual Critiques of Drone Warfare

©2013 The American Studies Association

Drone Encounters: Noor Behram, Omer Fast, and Visual Critiques of Drone Warfare

Matt Delmont

5000 feet’s the best. I love it when we’re sitting at 5000 feet. You have more description, plus at 5000 feet I mean, I can tell you what kind of shoes you’re wearing from a mile away. I can tell you what kind of clothes a person is wearing, if they have a beard, their hair color and everything else. There are very clear cameras on board. We have the IR, infrared, which we can switch to automatically, and that will pick up any heat signatures or cold signatures. I mean if someone sits down, let’s say, on a cold surface for a while and then gets up, you’ll still see the heat from that person for a long time. It kind of looks like a white blossom, just shining up into heaven. It’s quite beautiful.

—Anonymous drone pilot, quoted in Omer Fast’s 5000 Feet Is the Best

Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves.

—International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law), “Living under

Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices in Pakistan”

On January 23, 2009, three days after taking office, President Barack Obama approved missile strikes on two houses in Pakistan. The strikes, carried out by remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicles,

were the first drone attacks of the Obama presidency and killed several civilians alongside the targeted “militants.” The drone program has expanded dramati-cally during Obama’s first term, with five times as many confirmed drone strikes as during the Bush administration.1 Drones have become a favored weapon in the “war on terror” because of their supposed visual superiority. Drone program supporters, for example, tout the systems’ “surgical” sighting and targeting technology. The most common combat drone models, the Predator and the Reaper, are equipped with color and black-and-white television cameras, radar,

| 194 American Quarterly

infrared imaging for low-light conditions, and image intensifiers, which enable the aerial vehicles to send full-motion video to remotely located operators who can then use the drone’s lasers to target people or structures on the ground. In addition to these visual capabilities, drones also resist being seen both literally, as they fly at high altitudes and have stealth design features, and figuratively, as the Obama administration did not acknowledge the covert campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan until 2012, and government officials routinely downplay the number of drone attacks and civilian casualties. The concurrent drawdown of troops on the ground and ramp up of remote-controlled combat, moreover, re-duces US military casualties and helps minimize media attention to the various foreign and domestic sites of the war on terror. Drones draw their deadly power from these twin claims to visual superiority: the ability to see and to resist being seen. At the same time, however, artists, scholars, and human rights activists have used the visual to contest the expansion of the drone program.2 In this essay, I consider how Noor Behram’s photographs of drone attack scenes and Omer Fast’s short film 5000 Feet Is the Best undermine the supposed precision of drone technology and trouble the invisibility of drone warfare.

Proponents of the expanded use of armed drones in combat emphasize that the technologically advanced sighting systems lead to unprecedented levels of precision and accuracy. Responding to questions about President Obama’s first public acknowledgment of the classified drone program, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, “A hallmark of our counterterrorism efforts has been our ability to be exceptionally precise, exceptionally surgical and exceptionally targeted in the implementation of our counterterrorism operations.”3 The White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan of-fered a similar defense of the drone program, contending that “it’s this surgi-cal precision—the ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qaida terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it—that makes this counterterrorism tool so essential.”4 Critics of the drone war have sought to trouble this aura of precision and accuracy by emphasizing the large number of civilian casualties caused by drone strikes. The Bureau for Investigative Journalism’s research on the war on terror, the work of Clive Staf-ford Smith’s Reprieve legal charity, and “Living under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan” authored by scholars at the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law, for example, provide indispensible accounting of the human costs of drone attacks. Independent research on drone strikes is important,


because as the New York Times journalist Scott Shane notes, “accounts of strike after strike from official and unofficial sources are so at odds that they often seem to describe different events.”5

Like these written reports, the work of Pakistani photojournalist Noor Behram offers visual evidence that contradicts the official discourse of drone strikes taking place with “surgical precision.” Behram started photographing drone attack sites (mostly in North Waziristan in northwest Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan) because he was troubled by official Pakistani and US reports that described all the drone strike casualties as “militants.” “I can’t say how many extremists have been killed in reality,” Behram told the journalist Hasnain Kazim. “All I can say is that most of the victims are not militants, but those who aren’t involved. Mostly women and children.”6 Behram’s pho-tographs from an attack in the Dande Darpa Khel region of North Waziristan on August 21, 2009, reflect the larger themes in his work. One image shows a seven-year-old boy, Syed Wali Shah, who was killed in the attack, along with his parents.7 The photograph shows the boy’s face in close-up, his body lying on a small red-and-white prayer rug in preparation for his funeral. The only visible signs of trauma on the boy’s body are small bruises on his lips and eyes. While many of Behram’s photographs depict body parts dismembered by drone attacks, the picture of Syed Wali Shah confronts viewers with a death less bloody, but no less final. Behram’s photographs from the Dande Darpa Khel attack also include an image of Syed Wali Shah’s three siblings, who survived the attack. The children hold rubble from one of the destroyed houses, while a small fire smolders behind them. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the youngest child, dressed in a green shirt and standing between the older siblings, who is turned in profile to the camera, looking at her older sister. This photograph shows children who have survived a drone strike, but have suffered an incal-culable family loss (fig. 1).

Through his photographs, Behram seeks to create a visual archive of the largely unreported devastation caused by drone strikes. “When you live in an area where there is war, where there is suffering, where there are drone attacks, where there’s not proper reporting about what’s going on. . . . Even if you’re a professional, you can’t help but become angry at what you see,” Behram told the journalist Amna Nawaz. “You start to wonder how you can take the voices you hear and carry them to the rest of the world.”8 The importance of this work is clear when comparing Behram’s photographs of the Dande Darpa Khel strike to the mainstream news coverage of the attack. Reporting on the attack in the New York Times, Pir Zubair Shah and Lydia Polgreen wrote:


An early morning drone attack on a village near the Afghan border in North Waziristan killed 12 people on Friday, Pakistani security officials said. The village, Dande Darpa Khel, is part of the stronghold of Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan fighter and senior Taliban member. The missiles hit a compound near an Islamic school that Mr.

Haqqani had set up, and women and children were among the dead, according to Pakistani of-ficials, who spoke in return for anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.9

BBC News also reported that Dande Darpa Khel was targeted because “the village is believed to be frequented by associates of an Afghan Taliban leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani,” and noted drily, “officials said some people had also been wounded in the attack.”10 In contrast to these news reports, Behram’s photographs seek to humanize the men, women, and children who are treated as anonymous collateral damage in the pursuit of “militants” and “high value targets.” Just as importantly, Behram’s photographs offer a visual critique of the supposed precision and accuracy of drone sighting and targeting technologies.

Building a visual archive of this sort is dangerous work. The freelance jour-nalist Hayat Ullah Khan, for example, was abducted and killed after reporting

Figure 1.Three children who survived the US drone strike in the Dande Darpa Khel region of North Waziristan, Pakistan, August 21, 2009. Their parents and sibling were killed in the attack. Courtesy of Noor Behram/Reprieve.


for a Pakistani newspaper on a 2005 drone strike in Waziristan that killed an al-Qaeda leader. Other reporters have been attacked or threatened.11 With mountainous terrain and regular conflicts between Taliban members and Pakistani soldiers and police, the Waziristan region in which Behram works is also largely inaccessible to outside journalists. Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents the families of drone strike victims and has partnered with Behram, describes Waziristan as a “black hole of information.”12 In ad-dition to these challenges, Behram also contends with the threat of consecu-tive strikes on the same location. As the “Living under Drones” report notes, “There is now significant evidence that the US has repeatedly engaged in a practice sometimes referred to as ‘double tap,’ in which a targeted strike site is hit multiple times in relatively quick succession.”13 Faheem Qureshi, the only survivor of the Obama administration’s first drone strike, said that “usually, when a drone strikes and people die, nobody comes near the bodies for half an hour because they fear another missile will strike.”14 In an interview with the “Living under Drones” research team, Behram said: “Once there has been a drone attack, people have gone in for rescue missions, and five or ten minutes after the drone attack, they attack the rescuers who are there.”15 This “double tap” strategy not only makes it difficult for neighbors or humanitarian workers to provide emergency aid, it also deters people from collecting evidence on drone strikes and civilian casualties. Behram aims to meet this challenge, and his photographs provide critical evidence in the petitions Shahzad Akbar has filed on behalf of over seventy Pakistani families who have lost family members in US drone strikes.16 More broadly, Behram provides visual evidence of the imprecision of drones and the human cost of drone warfare.

If Behram’s photographs contest one aspect of the visual power of drones, the ability to “see” and kill precisely and accurately across great distances, Omer Fast’s short film 5000 Feet Is the Best offers an imaginative critique of the abil-ity of drones to resist being seen. In a Las Vegas hotel room in fall 2010, Fast conducted two interviews with a former Predator drone pilot turned casino security guard. The video and audio from these interviews appear occasionally in the thirty-minute video, with the pilot’s face and voice obscured. Rather than use these interviews to present a documentary picture of a drone pilot, however, Fast uses the real interviews as small pieces in three fictionalized se-quences that use staged interviews with a fictional drone pilot. Each sequence begins with the camera focused on the drone pilot (played by Denis O’Hare) seated on a bed, being interviewed by a man who is partly off-screen, his back to the camera. As the pilot begins to tell a story, the video switches to another set of actors portraying the story he narrates. One sequence begins with a


family packing their car for a trip: “Let’s say it’s the weekend and the family loves the outdoors. Or maybe they need to get away for a while because of the problems Dad’s having with the provisional authority. . . . So the family drives down their quiet block on a weekend morning on their way to the country. They take a left, then a right. Stop at the usual checkpoints to present their documents to the occupying forces” (fig. 2).17

While aspects of the narrative, such as “provisional authority” and “oc-cupying forces,” evoke militarized zones, the film is deliberately misplaced and miscast. The setting is suburban Las Vegas, and it is a white family who stops their Volkswagen station wagon at the security checkpoint. As the family drives into rural Nevada, they encounter a pickup truck and three white men with shovels and guns. Again the narration does not mesh with the images. A teenager with a “traditional headdress” is portrayed by an actor with a baseball cap, while the older men “dressed in clothes more typical of tribes from further south,” wear flannel and canvas work clothes. As the family approaches and slowly passes the men, the video alternates between footage of the scene on the ground and black-and-white aerial images that track the scene unfolding below. The aerial view resembles drone video footage and anticipates the nar-rator’s conclusion:

A shrieking sound pierces the thin air, cleaving through it like the cry of a heavenly messenger. The Hellfire missile hits the ground before anyone can react, nearly vaporizing the three men on impact. The pick-up truck takes most of the damage, but the station wagon isn’t spared. It pulls up ahead and waits, generously, patiently. Time passes. Time is on my side. Seeing the world from above doesn’t just flatten things, it sharpens them. It makes relation-ships clearer. The family continues their journey. Their bodies will never be buried. (fig. 3)18

Rather than follow a documentary impulse to capture the reality of the drone wars, Fast instead creates an unnerving picture of drone strikes on US soil. Fast is playing with what he describes as the “inherent contradiction” of drones, “being there and not being there.”19 By setting the fictionalized drone strike in Nevada near Creech Air Force Base, the center of operations for drone pilots, Fast’s film questions the existence of safe civilian spaces in the drone wars and offers an evocative homecoming for drone technology.

Fast uses the real interview excerpts with the drone pilot to similarly unsettling effect. As the pilot describes details of operating a drone and the images that the system affords, the images on the screen show aerial video of Las Vegas–area landscapes. When the pilot describes why surveying at “5000 feet above is the best” and muses that infrared cameras produce images that


Figure 3.A drone surveys the wreckage of a Hellfire missile attack in Omer Fast’s 5000 Feet Is the Best. Courtesy of gb agency, Paris.

Figure 2.A family stops at a security checkpoint in Omer Fast’s 5000 Feet Is the Best. Fast’s film deliberately misplaces the war on terror in suburban Las Vegas. Courtesy of gb agency, Paris.


are “quite beautiful,” the viewer sees an aerial image of a child riding a bike through a dirt expanse before reaching the paved road of a suburban subdivi-sion. The camera moves vertically, until the child is a small black dot moving across a neatly ordered suburban landscape. The aerial images, coupled with the pilot’s testimony, imply that a drone is tracking the child. No Hellfire missile punctuates this sequence, but the film unmistakably makes drones part of the skyscape of the suburban United States. In doing so, Fast alludes both to the increasing domestic use of drone technologies and to the every-day implications of such surveillance. The authors of “Living under Drones” emphasize that constant drone surveillance and the persistent threat of missile strikes produce “anxiety” and “psychological trauma” for Pakistanis: “Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves.”20 The ability to launch missiles differentiates the drones that hover over Afghanistan, Pakistan, and more recently Yemen and Somalia from drones and similar remote-controlled aircraft used to patrol the US-Mexico border and for surveillance by the FBI, DEA, and an increasing number of local law enforcement agencies.21 Without flattening these differences, Fast’s film suggests that drones can have devastating consequences without being lethally armed.

A final sequence in Fast’s film emphasizes that the drone operator is part of a larger system that coordinates attacks, but remains hidden from sight. The scene again places drones in the domestic skyscape, with the real pilot’s interview playing over an aerial shot of the Las Vegas strip, with bright lights shining against the night sky. As the camera moves to close-up images of the thrill rides on top of the Stratosphere Las Vegas tower, the pilot describes his first drone kill:

Usually other outside observers would come into the GCS [ground control station] at this point, just to kind of watch and monitor the situation. And the people who sit in the main building, they have projected images up on the wall of camera feeds that are coming out, like everything up to the Pentagon can see what we’re doing on this feed. And we fired off a Hellfire missile and got the target. It didn’t quite stand in to me that, hey, I just killed someone. My first time, that was within my first year there. It didn’t quite impact. It was later on, through a couple more missions, that the dreams started.22

The story ends here, but the suggestion is that, like many drone pilots, his remote combat role took a psychological toll.23 With his references to the video cameras and screens that link Creech Air Force Base, the Pentagon, and the target site in Afghanistan, the pilot makes it clear that he is not an indepen-dent operator but part of an attack progression, or what the Air Force calls the


“kill chain.” As the geographer Derek Gregory describes, the “kill-chain can be thought of as a dispersed and distributed apparatus, a congeries of actors, objects, practices, discourses and affects, that entrains the people who are made part of it and constitutes them as particular kinds of subjects.”24 Drone warfare depends on visual technologies that make its targets visible while making the kill chain invisible, and “5000 Feet Is the Best” reworks the visual tropes of drone warfare to disrupt the ability of these systems to resist being seen.

My title, “Drone Encounters,” is meant to echo Melani McAlister’s impor-tant book, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (2001, updated edition 2005). Among the many virtues of McAli-ster’s book is that it both historicizes and provides a framework to consider the relationship of visual culture and the “war on terror.” This is particularly true of McAlister’s analysis of the “cultural politics of encounter.” Epic Encounters, McAlister writes, “aims to expand the idea of ‘encounters’ to include those that happen across wide geographic space, among people who will never meet except through the medium of culture.”25 This essay has explored the encounters engendered in drone warfare. As in McAlister’s expanded definition, drone en-counters happen across “wide geographic spaces” and map “moral geographies” of ethical connection and separation among these spaces. Drone operators “will never meet” their targets except through visual representations mediated by drone cameras, satellite relays, and video screens in the ground control sta-tion. And, more so than the cultural productions McAlister examines, these drone encounters are one-sided, ominous, and frequently deadly. McAlister’s work encourages us to see both the counterterrorism policies that authorize drone warfare and the visual technologies drones employ as meaning-making activities. Viewed in this way, critics of the human cost of drone wars must attend not only to policy critiques but also to cultural productions like those of Noor Behram and Omer Fast that work to undermine the visual superior-ity drones claim.

Notes1. As of October 26, 2012, there have been 334 documented strikes in Pakistan and 44 documented

strikes in Yemen and Somalia, in addition to numerous strikes in the official war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. For an up-to-date account, see “Tracking America’s Drone War,” Washington Post, http://apps.washingtonpost.com/foreign/drones/.

2. Among the works on visual culture and drone warfare, see Keith Feldman, “Empire’s Verticality: The Af/Pak Frontier, Visual Culture, and Racialization from Above,” Comparative American Studies 9.4


(2011): 325–41; Derek Gregory, “The Everywhere War,” Geographical Journal 177.3 (2011): 238–50; Gregory, “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern Warfare,” Theory, Culture, and Society 28.7–8 (2011): 188–215; and Ian Graham Ronald Shaw and Majed Akhter, “The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan,” Antipode 44.4 (2012): 1490–509. On the aerial imagery in relation to the war on terror, see Caren Kaplan, “‘A Rare and Chilling View’: Aerial Photography as Biopower in the Visual Culture of 9/11,” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 11.2 (2011), http://reconstruction.eserver.org/112/Kaplan_Caren.shtml.

3. “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney,” January 31, 2012, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/31/press-briefing-press-secretary-jay-carney-13112.

4. Council on Foreign Relations, “Brennan’s Speech on Counterterrorism,” April 30, 2012, www.cfr.org/counterterrorism/brennans-speech-counterterrorism-april-2012/p28100.

5. Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Is Disputed on Civilian Toll in Drone Strikes,” New York Times, August 11, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html.

6. Hasnain Kazim, “Photos from the Ground Show Civilian Casualties,” Spiegel Online International, July 18, 2011, www.spiegel.de/international/world/drone-war-in-pakistan-photos-from-the-ground-show-civilian-casualties-a-775131.html.

7. Chris Woods, “Over 160 Children Reported among Drone Deaths,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, August 11, 2011, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/11/more-than-160-children-killed-in-us-strikes/.

8. Amna Nawaz, “For Many Pakistanis, ‘USA’ Means ‘Drones,’” NBC News.com, June 26, 2012, http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/26/12403677-for-many-pakistanis-usa-means-drones?lite.

9. Pir Zubair Shah and Lydia Polgreen, “U.S. Drone Strike Kills 12 in Pakistan Border Region,” New York Times, August 21, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/world/asia/22pstan.html?_r=0.

10. “Deadly Missile Strike in Pakistan,” BBC News, August 21, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8213354.stm.

11. Tara McKelvey, “Covering Obama’s Secret War,” Columbia Journalism Review, May–June 2011, www.cjr.org/feature/covering_obamas_secret_war.php?page=all.

12. Shane, “C.I.A. Is Disputed.”13. International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice

Clinic (NYU School of Law), “Living under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from U.S. Drone Practices in Pakistan,” September 2012, 74.

14. Ibid., 75.15. Ibid.16. Nawaz, “For Many Pakistanis, ‘USA’ Means ‘Drones.’”17. 5000 Feet Is the Best (dir. Omer Fast; 2012). The film is part of the contemporary art collection at the

Dallas Museum of Art. A clip is available on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/34050994. 18. Ibid.19. Noah Simblist, “Interview: Omer Fast,” . . . might be good, July 27, 2012, www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/

index.php/interview/index/195/134.20. “Living under Drones,” vii.21. On the increasing use of drones in the United States, see American Civil Liberties Union, “Protecting

Privacy from Aerial Surveillance: Recommendations for Government Use of Drone Aircraft,” December 2011, 6–7.

22. 5000 Feet Is the Best.23. A 2011 US Air Force study found that nearly half of drone pilots reported “high operational stress.”

See Elisabeth Bushmiller, “Air Force Drone Operators Report High Levels of Stress,” New York Times, December 18, 2011.

24. Gregory, “From a View to a Kill,” 196.25. Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945,

updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1.

drone encounters: noor behram, omer fast, and visual critiques of drone warfare

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