Drone Documentary

A total of 23 people were killed in [a drone strike on a convoy in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan February 21, 2010], all civilians. An investigation by the military later found that drone pilots “ignored or downplayed” evidence that the convoy was a civilian one. A transcript of the drone operator’s conversation was later made public through a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU.

The Uruzgan drone strike and the events surrounding it form much of the basis of “National Bird,” an extraordinary new documentary about the U.S. drone program. The film, which opened Friday in Los Angeles, profiles the lives of former drone operators, as well as victims of the program, including the survivors of the Uruzgan attack.

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“We made this film in part to highlight the repercussions of future governments holding these powers, but I don’t think many people realize how bad things already are under Obama,” says Kennebeck. “The whistleblowers in the film took great risks, because they felt that people need to know what is happening inside the drone program.”

“[O]ver the course of our shooting, the film ended up being as much about the consequences of whistleblowing as it did about the drone program itself.”

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“I can say the drone program is wrong because I don’t know how many people I’ve killed,” Heather, a drone operator now suffering from PTSD, says in the film. Having lost several friends in the program to suicide, she says she is tormented by her role in drone strikes that she believes killed and maimed civilians. She is also consumed with fear that she will soon be targeted for speaking out.

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[D]uring the making of the film, a drone operator named Daniel, a former NSA operative at Fort Meade, has his house raided by the FBI and is informed that he is under investigation for speaking out about the program.

The Obama administration has been notorious for using that law to prosecute individuals speaking out about the covert warfare programs. Indeed, more individuals have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act by Obama than under all previous administrations combined.

  The Intercept