From Robert Greenwald, the documentary director that gave us films like OUTFOXED, UNCONSTITUTIONAL: THE WAR ON OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES, UNCOVERED: THE WAR ON IRAQ, and WAR ON WHISTLEBLOWERS comes another fairly short but nevertheless devastating documentary about how endangered America is by what our government does, allegedly in our name but totally ignoring the value of human lifer we hold dear. That film is UNMANNED: AMERICA'S DRONE WARS.
Given that thousands of American troops and millions of innocent civilians have had to pay the ultimate price for an out-of-control American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, a new kind of warfare has emerged in recent years, that of drone warfare, instigated by unmanned drones controlled by pilots in isolated bunkers thousands of miles away from the battlefield itself. Developed by the Bush Administration in the so-called "War On Terror", and accelerated under the Obama Administration, such warfare was supposed to reduce the so-called "collateral damage" and unintended side effects of actual person-to-person combat. But as Greenwald found out, interviewing one pilot who controlled several drone strikes, the victims of such drone strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq, and also U.S. military veterans like Andrew Bacevich and Lawrence Wilkerson (the latter the former press spokesman to Colin Powell), the U.S. drone program has had some incredible problems in minimizing such damage; and in fact, instead of helping us win the War On Terror, it may in fact be radicalizing the very people in those areas of the world where the strikes are being carried out—the very people who we are supposedly saving, but in fact could turn out to be the next jihadists, whether they go into what's left of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or whatever future extremist Islamic terrorist group that comes in the future.
Exactly how are we protecting ourselves from another 9/11, or incidents like the attacks in Paris, Brussels, or San Bernardino if, by killing with imprecise technology launched from an isolated bunker, combined with imprecise intelligence, we end up killing ten, twenty, or a hundred innocent civilians just to get a mere handful of jihadists? How is that protecting either the national security or, more importantly, the people of the United States? UNMANNED, like the more recent fictional feature film EYE IN THE SKY, probes that conundrum in detail, and the results of our drone strikes are not made to be pleasant to watch, even as they resemble video games. This movie forces us to think of the blowback and the unintended consequences that could come our way in the future. We are ill-served by our leaders who make decisions without having thought such things through, and that is what the essential nexus of UNMANNED is really about.
