The Killer Drone Lovers Have Their Movie

If the recent spate of anti-drone movies and plays was making you feel warm thoughts about U.S. culture, you’ll want to avoid seeing “Eye in the Sky,” starring Helen Mirren, Alan Rickman, and Aaron Paul. This is what “Zero Dark Thirty” was for torture lies. This is what “The Interview” was for hatred of North Korea. The Director of “Eye in the Sky,” Gavin Hood, openly brags about having had military advisors on this film, just as those films had their government advisors. And it shows.

“I’ll bet the military loves this film,” I told Hood after a screening in Washington, D.C., on Monday. He claimed that some loved it, some liked it, both in the military and in some human rights groups that I won’t name because I doubt very much Hood’s implication that at least one of them didn’t condemn this piece of propaganda.

Let’s be clear, this film is the best quality drone film yet made and has the coolest technology in it, including drones the size and shape of birds and beetles. But it is the furthest presentation of drone use from reality. Following the film screening, the director and General Eaton (no last name, like Cher) and Patrick Tucker, a technology writer from Defense One, gave a little presentation that included flying a tiny drone in the theater. Said Tucker, as if he had proved this: “So everything you saw in this movie is very close to reality.”

I asked the director roughly this: We know of actual cases where the target was not identified, where the target could have been captured, and where the target was not actually about to commit mass murder. In fact the Justice Department has redefined “imminent threat” to be virtually meaningless, and I don’t know of a single case in reality that matches this fictional fantasy. Do you?

Gavin Hood hemmed and hawed but said that No, he was unaware of a single case in reality that matched what he had produced in his slick propaganda. Then it was his turn to question me: Do I oppose the whole drone program?

I replied that it is counterproductive and that every time a top official retires they point that out, that it creates more enemies than it kills. Remarkably, Hood said that he agreed entirely and that in fact this point (which showed up nowhere at all in his movie) was the very point of his movie.

Then Hood strayed back into his own fantasy, recounting as if we hadn’t just seen it that in the film one politician comments that it might be better politically to allow foreign terrorists to kill lots of people than for the politician’s own government to be exposed as having killed one person.

Well, yes, this proves that in a fantastic scenario that hasn’t ever happened a fictional politician could cynically discard human lives. It proves nothing else. But it creates the sick pretense that murdering is wise and not murdering is a form of propaganda. And, for the record, the “one person” was actually one unknown innocent plus several other people understood to be complicit in planning mass murder.

The cherry on top of this movie’s feat of manipulation is Hood’s making one of the drone victims white. Thus the drone program is not racist, is not killing people who haven’t been identified, is not killing people who could have been captured, and is only killing people who are literally in the act of arming themselves to kills lots of other people momentarily.

The killer drone has its movie and it also has its argument. This piece of fiction is what the ticking time bomb nonsense is for torture. This is what every reincarnation of Hitler is for war as a whole. This is Obama’s dream eulogy when the first drone warrior king is finally laid to rest.

All sins have been absolved.

Relax. Get some popcorn.

Or wake up, get outraged and join the next protest at Creech Air Base. Please. We’re better than this.