I have to remind myself this is killing we're talking about. It's easy to get lost in the details: what the acronyms mean, who's got security clearance, how the technology works. Of course, the biggest stumbling block to grasping the drone clusterfuck is overcoming Pentagon PR, dutifully lip-synched by dear President Obama, who paternally reassures us in his halting tones that it's all under control. Well, it's not, it couldn't or shouldn't be, and it's simply another version of the world's greatest game: hunting humans. Wim Wenders and Errol Morris join their moral and aesthetic gravitas to executive produce National Bird, opening tomorrow at the Roxie Theater.
As a film, National Bird is exquisite, agit-prop raised to the level of poetry. The framing of the shots, capturing the talking heads in the midst of their thoughts, emotions, and mundane circumstances; the sequence of the narrative, with its abrupt pockets of compassionate reveals; the meticulous peeling back of layers until the drone clusterfuck is revealed in its fearful symmetry: American agents and Afghani victims. Director Sonia Kennebeck has made a masterpiece. You won't be conscious of her skill as she systematically completes the puzzle of military technology and human suffering. You'll be too busy processing your emotions.
Heather was an imagery analyst or screener, whose voiceover opens the film. "You were omniscient in people's lives. And you literally just kind of hover over their area. Sometimes you'd watch them for days. And then you'd get intel that this guy's a bad guy. And you'd wait until he walked out into the fields to meet with friends or something, and you'd blow him up. Drop a hellfire missile on him." Heather was considered high-risk for suicide, but her team was undermanned. This Dark Lady of the Drones, raven-haired, tattooed, thin, muscular, quick-witted, candid, and sorrowful, wrote a piece for the Guardian on Dec. 29, 2013.
Daniel's participation is swathed in impenetrable layers of classified information. On camera, he says he was stationed at Fort Meade, next to NSA headquarters, had NSA clearance, and since the intelligence directorate handles signal intelligence, had a position overseas using signal intel capacity. Then he stops himself. "I have to be conscious of what I can and can't say on camera." The mental acrobatics of whistleblowing within the arcane confines of official secrecy render simple sentences impossible. On Aug. 8, 2014, after his last day on the job, his home was raided by three dozen U.S. agents, pistols drawn.
Lisa was a technical sergeant on the DGS, or Distributed Ground System, a secret program that "spans the globe and eats data. This is global. This is getting information anywhere at any time. Shooting people from anywhere at any time. It's like borders don't matter anymore." Deeply disturbed by her role in taking out 121,000 insurgent targets from 2007-09, she visits Afghanistan with her friend Asma. Fifty minutes in, we are shown the unimaginable: Afghanis as human beings. We meet survivors of the Feb. 21, 2010 bombing of Kuchi nomads in Khost province in the Ali Shir district, launched by the Predator Unmanned Area Vehicle crew at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. General Stanley McChrystal apologizes on TV.
Kennebeck handles this incendiary material like a surgeon wields a scalpel, with skill and compassion for everyone involved, including the viewer. Yes, the drone program is like shooting fish in barrel. Yes, Afghani villages are now the ultimate concentration camp. No, the power dynamic could not be more lopsided. No, the dignified tribal Afghanis don't stand a chance against an omnipotent robotic sniper remotely controlled by foreigners whose transcribed dialogue is the crass, flippant, trivializing talk of adolescent boys playing video games. Kennebeck's focus is funereal and unflinching so that ours can be, too.
Jesselyn Radack, who is Edward Snowden's attorney, has represented several people charged under the 1917 Espionage Act. Daniel is now her client. Radack emphasizes the seriousness of the charge, which brands someone an enemy of the state in a David vs. Goliath scenario, "a single person vs. the entire executive branch." Her facial muscles not completely under control, she christens "this clusterfuck we call the Drone Program," denouncing with detachment "its effects on operators, its effects on innocent victims, its shaky legal reasoning." Zombie Obama is seen on TV dredging up "9/11" as justification.
Daniel is an activist in the Snowden-Manning mold, pale, slight, conscientious. He says, "Drones embolden commanders because there's no immediate threat or consequence. It makes war so easy and convenient, so simple, that people who have access to this technology say, Why wouldn't I use this?" Dignified in his simple tribal dress, an Afghani man in the calmest voice, his turbulent heart showing in his eyes, speaks into Kennebeck's camera and pleads for the terror to stop. Lisa weeps as she says, "I was told they forgave me for the part I played. Not everybody is a freakin' terrorist. And we need to get out of that mindset."