Not clear, but grainy, smudgy, black and white, people riding or walking, seen from far above and so foreshortened that they looked like awkward small insects, not human at all, more like ants. The footage in the film of what the drones see before launching their missiles at cars and trucks and buses and houses and gatherings was startling. drone strikes, some survivors, some relatives of the killed, some maimed victims themselves. Their conscientious grief at what they had been doing was made emphatically real in interviews with civilian Afghans who had been the targets of U.S. Why am I even thinking about this? The other day I watched Sonia Kennebeck’s documentary National Bird (2016) about three drone operator whistleblowers, including Daniel Hale. Vengeance on insects was ethical, gratitude for them ridiculous. I was not taught to greet them as brother and sister ant.
I was not taught to marvel at the fact of their existence. I had never been taught that they lived in the same web of life that included me and my welfare. To smash a little insect was, if not a righteous act, at least one that might make the world better for human habitation. My general cultural sense was that insects were bad, injurious to humans, carrying disease or damaging our food or being simply creepy, sneaking into our houses to unsettle us with their creepiness, the way they swarmed to anything sweet and left behind, my mother claimed, insidious diseases. I had no respect for them as living beings, no sense of them as miraculous products of evolution with an intricate social organization, no sense that they had as much right to their existence as myself.Īnd they were heedless of my overwhelming power. When I was a kid, I thought nothing of trodding on ants, long columns of tiny brown and black ants, reconnoitering for food, others returning, carrying crumbs or bits of other insects-a grasshopper’s leg, a fly’s wing. excuses itself from the jurisdiction of international law … to shield ourselves from assaults on our myth of perpetual goodness. But what kind of person doesn’t question the actions he is responsible for? Is his life of more value than the people being killed? He said, “The answer came to me, that to stop the cycle of violence, I ought to sacrifice my own life and not that of another person.”
He said what he feared more than jail was the temptation not to question these drone murders. Now, he has been sentenced to 45 months for truth telling.
He would be indicted under the Espionage Act, as though he were a spy, and face years in prison. Daniel knew that releasing this material would bring the wrath of the government down on him. Daniel Hale, whose portrait I’ve been painting, is the Air Force drone whistleblower who felt compelled by conscience to release classified documents showing that nearly 90% of drone assassination victims are civilians, innocent people, murdered with his help.
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