Directed by ROBERT GREENWALD
What does it do to a man’s soul to be a warrior in Barack Obama’s game of drone warfare, being holed up at a remote military base in the Nevada desert as you go about your business eliminating, at a mere touch of a button, the “enemy” in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Yemen, as if you’re doing no more than playing the latest iteration of Call of Duty? In Robert Greenwald’s documentary film Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars, Brandon Bryant, a young US air force veteran, speaks with searing honesty about his experiences as a drones operator. He was trained to carry out attacks but was never prepared for how he might react to or feel about what he was doing – all that remote-controlled precision killing. He talks about one day watching on his console as a man, injured in a drone attack he initiated, bleeds to death: “He’s just, like, rolling around, but you can see, like, where his leg is missing and the blood is spurting out and landing on the ground and it’s cooling …”
Investigative director Robert Greenwald captures never-before-seen footage from the tribal region of Pakistan and in-depth interviews with drone strike survivors and those most impacted by America’s drone policy to unravel the Obama Administration’s drone policy piece by piece in Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars. UNMANNED is a work of ruthless propaganda – in the best sense. It makes no attempt to contextualise or create space for opposing views. It’s not balanced or deliberative. It wants only to build a prosecutor’s case against Obama and America’s drone war and it does so with immense power and anger. Is this foreign policy and covert military actions are often imperfect and result in creating more enemies for the American people who have little knowledge of how drone targets are set and the killings are carried out.
