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

of Drone Warfare
Matt Delmont
American Quarterly, Volume 65, Number 1, March 2013, pp. 193-202 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0002
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| 193 Visual Critiques of Drone Warfare
2013 The American Studies Association
Drone Encounters: Noor Behram, Omer
Fast, and Visual Critiques of Drone
Warfare
Matt Delmont
5000 feets the best. I love it when were sitting at 5000 feet. You have more description,
plus at 5000 feet I mean, I can tell you what kind of shoes youre 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, lets say, on a cold surface for a while and then gets up, youll
still see the heat from that person for a long time. It kind of looks like a white blossom, just
shining up into heaven. Its quite beautiful.
Anonymous drone pilot, quoted in Omer Fasts 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 red
at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves.
International Human Rights and Conict 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
O
n January 23, 2009, three days after taking ofce, President Barack
Obama approved missile strikes on two houses in Pakistan. The
strikes, carried out by remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicles,
were the rst drone attacks of the Obama presidency and killed several civilians
alongside the targeted militants. The drone program has expanded dramati-
cally during Obamas rst term, with ve times as many conrmed 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 intensiers, which enable
the aerial vehicles to send full-motion video to remotely located operators who
can then use the drones lasers to target people or structures on the ground. In
addition to these visual capabilities, drones also resist being seen both literally,
as they y at high altitudes and have stealth design features, and guratively, as
the Obama administration did not acknowledge the covert campaign of drone
strikes in Pakistan until 2012, and government ofcials 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 Behrams photographs of drone attack scenes and
Omer Fasts short lm 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 Obamas
rst public acknowledgment of the classied 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 its this surgi-
cal precisionthe ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous
tumor called an al-Qaida terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around
itthat 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 Journalisms research on the war on terror, the work of Clive Staf-
ford Smiths 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 Conict 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,
| 195 Visual Critiques of Drone Warfare
because as the New York Times journalist Scott Shane notes, accounts of strike
after strike from ofcial and unofcial 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 ofcial 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 ofcial Pakistani and US
reports that described all the drone strike casualties as militants. I cant 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 arent involved. Mostly women and children.
6
Behrams pho-
tographs from an attack in the Dande Darpa Khel region of North Waziristan
on August 21, 2009, reect 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 boys 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 boys body are small bruises on his lips and eyes.
While many of Behrams photographs depict body parts dismembered by drone
attacks, the picture of Syed Wali Shah confronts viewers with a death less
bloody, but no less nal. Behrams photographs from the Dande Darpa Khel
attack also include an image of Syed Wali Shahs three siblings, who survived
the attack. The children hold rubble from one of the destroyed houses, while
a small re smolders behind them. The viewers eye is drawn to the youngest
child, dressed in a green shirt and standing between the older siblings, who is
turned in prole 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 (g. 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 theres not proper reporting about whats going on. . . . Even if youre a
professional, you cant 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 Behrams 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:
| 196 American Quarterly
An early morning drone attack on a village near
the Afghan border in North Waziristan killed 12
people on Friday, Pakistani security ofcials said.
The village, Dande Darpa Khel, is part of the
stronghold of Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan
ghter 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-
cials, 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, ofcials said some people had also
been wounded in the attack.
10
In contrast to these news reports, Behrams
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, Behrams 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.
| 197 Visual Critiques of Drone Warfare
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 conicts 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 signicant 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 administrations rst 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 ve or ten minutes
after the drone attack, they attack the rescuers who are there.
15
This double
tap strategy not only makes it difcult 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
led 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 Behrams photographs contest one aspect of the visual power of drones,
the ability to see and kill precisely and accurately across great distances, Omer
Fasts short lm 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 pilots 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 ctionalized se-
quences that use staged interviews with a ctional drone pilot. Each sequence
begins with the camera focused on the drone pilot (played by Denis OHare)
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
| 198 American Quarterly
family packing their car for a trip: Lets say its the weekend and the family
loves the outdoors. Or maybe they need to get away for a while because of the
problems Dads 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 (g. 2).
17
While aspects of the narrative, such as provisional authority and oc-
cupying forces, evoke militarized zones, the lm 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 annel 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-
rators conclusion:
A shrieking sound pierces the thin air, cleaving through it like the cry of a heavenly messenger.
The Hellre 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 isnt
spared. It pulls up ahead and waits, generously, patiently. Time passes. Time is on my side.
Seeing the world from above doesnt just atten things, it sharpens them. It makes relation-
ships clearer. The family continues their journey. Their bodies will never be buried. (g. 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 ctionalized drone strike in
Nevada near Creech Air Force Base, the center of operations for drone pilots,
Fasts lm 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 Vegasarea landscapes. When the pilot describes why surveying at 5000
feet above is the best and muses that infrared cameras produce images that
| 199 Visual Critiques of Drone Warfare
Figure 3.
A drone surveys the wreckage of a Hellre missile attack in Omer Fasts 5000 Feet Is the Best. Courtesy of
gb agency, Paris.
Figure 2.
A family stops at a security checkpoint in Omer Fasts 5000 Feet Is the Best. Fasts lm deliberately misplaces
the war on terror in suburban Las Vegas. Courtesy of gb agency, Paris.
| 200 American Quarterly
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 pilots testimony, imply that a drone is tracking the child. No Hellre
missile punctuates this sequence, but the lm 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 red 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 attening these differences, Fasts lm suggests
that drones can have devastating consequences without being lethally armed.
A nal sequence in Fasts lm 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 pilots
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
rst 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 were doing on this feed. And we red off
a Hellre missile and got the target. It didnt quite stand in to me that, hey, I just killed
someone. My rst time, that was within my rst year there. It didnt 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
| 201 Visual Critiques of Drone Warfare
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 McAlisters 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-
sters 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 McAlisters 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 McAlisters expanded denition, 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. McAlisters
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.
Notes
1. 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 ofcial war zones of Iraq and
Afghanistan. For an up-to-date account, see Tracking Americas Drone War, Washington Post, http://
apps.washingtonpost.com/foreign/drones/.
2. Among the works on visual culture and drone warfare, see Keith Feldman, Empires Verticality: The
Af/Pak Frontier, Visual Culture, and Racialization from Above, Comparative American Studies 9.4
| 202 American Quarterly
(2011): 32541; Derek Gregory, The Everywhere War, Geographical Journal 177.3 (2011): 23850;
Gregory, From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern Warfare, Theory, Culture, and Society 28.78
(2011): 188215; and Ian Graham Ronald Shaw and Majed Akhter, The Unbearable Humanness
of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan, Antipode 44.4 (2012): 1490509. 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 Brieng by Press Secretary Jay Carney, January 31, 2012, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-
ofce/2012/01/31/press-brieng-press-secretary-jay-carney-13112.
4. Council on Foreign Relations, Brennans 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 Obamas Secret War, Columbia Journalism Review, MayJune 2011, www.
cjr.org/feature/covering_obamas_secret_war.php?page=all.
12. Shane, C.I.A. Is Disputed.
13. International Human Rights and Conict 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 lm 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.uentcollab.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, 67.
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.