Hot Docs 2015 Interview: DRONE, Tonje Hessen Schei Talks Gamers And Geopolitics
It was a beautiful sunny day on a quiet, out of the way cafe patio in Toronto that I had a chance to sit down with director Tonje Hessen Schei and speak at length about the politics, psychology, and current perception of drone warfare.
Tonje is passionate and directly to the point in terms of her views and beliefs, and was able to elaborate on a number of threads and facets in her current documentary on the subject, Drone. Most alarmingly is how far things have come in the past few years, and that remain still in the early days in terms of what the rules and ethics will look like while the technology proliferates at an ever increasing rate.
Kurt Halfyard: The simple coincidence that put DRONE high on my list of films to see as Hot Docs was starting, was that I had just watched Andrew Niccol's GOOD KILL, and the two films make a nice double feature. Your picture is looking at things from a messy-reality, big picture POV, and Niccol is looking to tell an individual story within this broader reality. It is really quite amazing how similar, in the narrative of drone warfare, they share several powerful touch-points, and how each of those films chooses touch those same points.
Tonje Hessen Schei: I've seen the trailer and heard a lot about it, we actually released the same day in the UK. It was kind of interesting, as a lot of the reviews had Good Kill and Drone in the same review. Also, Brandon Bryan [a former US Airforce drone pilot who is a significant subject in Drone] was a key consultant on Niccol's film, so he worked on that script, it is not a co-incidence, and I look forward to seeing it.
One of the numbers thrown out in your film that really stuck out, for me, was that 87 countries have access to drone technology, but I was not entirely sure, was whether or not this was consumer technologies, hobby kits and beyond, or active, militarized versions of the technology.
That is military drones, and since we locked picture, it has gone up to 100. This includes Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.
And do you have a sense of how many air-spaces have foreign drones in them. A country like one heavily featured in your film, Waziristan, can't really stop the US from flying these vehicles in their airspace, but countries like the UK, the US, and much of Europe, would be in a better position of stop violations of their airspace. What is everyone else going to do now that the US has written the first few drafts of the drone playbook?
After 9/11 the US has been re-writing the laws of war without the world doing much to stop them. I am very concerned about the silence that Europe has had around this issue. If you look at what Bush had to go through with Guantanamo and torture, and compare it to what Obama is experiencing with the demand for transparency and accountability when he is simply assassinates suspects with their families or neighbors and there is no question asked.
That is one thing that we are very concerned about, the standard that the US has set with this type of warfare when the technology is spreading so fast. Personally, I think it is just a question of time before countries like Russia start taking out people around the world and what they see as imminent threats. And what will be the response to that?
One could make the case that Guantanamo is closed as much by public scrutiny as it was easier to just go out and kill potential terrorists where they stand instead of rendition and detainment.
Especially when you operate in areas where it is hard to figure out what is happened. Like in Waziristan, access for people to see what is happening there is almost impossible. So for us, it has been very important to work with organizations like the bureau of investigative journalism that started naming the dead. They started putting faces onto the numbers of people being killed. But it takes such a huge effort to collect all that data and try to identify all the people.
Surely, it is an issue of time. There is the argument with technology, that ethics and the law cannot keep up with the acceleration of possibility. There is a segment of the film with Clive Stafford Smith trying to debate the legality, but by the time anything gets done, the definition, debate and actions have floated way out over and away.
The gap between the weapon industry and things like the UN, and other institutions that are meant to protect our human rights, is growing exponentially. It is very hard to keep up with new technology and how it is used. Especially when you have the CIA running the show. I don't know if you have been following the news about the two hostages that were killed by drones in Waziristan in January, but Obama just came out two days ago, and admitted to killing an American and Italian aid worker. They were in a compound, and the drone pilots didn't know they were there.
To, all of a sudden, have all that much transparency, and apologies, and compensation to the victims...Of course this is a tragedy and this is horrible, and I'm really glad that Obama is coming forth and admitting that this is happening. But this is what we have trying to tell people all along, that these drone strikes are not as precise as the story being sold to us both by the Obama administration or the mainstream media. And we need to look behind the numbers and behind the assumption that this is a perfect and precise weapon.
I get a sense that when things started, that things might have been more precise in how applied, to take out a very selected target in an isolated space, but drone warfare seems a strong example of the slippery slope in that it goes from careful identification and authorization to using behaviour algorithms to select targets in public spaces and an overall 'this will solve everything' attitude. And if there are other people around, then so be it.
I think we have seen an attempt to redefine what a civilian is. If you are within a certain distance of what is a suspected terrorist, all of a sudden you become what they call a 'civilian combatant.' I mean what the hell is that? It is justifying and legalizing killing civilians. And working very closely with Brandon Bryant, any male that is military age -- and what is perceived as military age is 12 and up -- that is basically most of the boys and men in that region.
And based-on-behaviour drone strikes called signature strikes, they say that they have stopped using those criteria, but I doubt it. It seems like several strikes lately, especially in Yemen have been signature strike based. Another thing we came across was basically war crimes, where rescuers dealing with a drone strike were attacked in the so-called 'double tap.' That has received such low attention I think. It seems like the US media is very careful of going there. It is very clear in the Geneva conventions that you are not supposed to kill rescuers.
Do you have a sense, now that everything is recorded, or at least video has to be transmitted by various frequencies for remote control, if anyone has been able to hack, or grab video streams? I mean one way to use co-opt the technology to subvert messaging or lack-thereof.
We have never heard of anyone hacking in yet. But that is a very interesting thought. If there is any chance that this could ever work in a legal way, there would have to be complete transparency in all the video feeds. But also oversight inside the drone operating rooms. Bryan believes that there should be complete public surveillance. I would definitely change a lot of things if this were so.
Can you talk a bit more about the intertwining of the military and gamer culture? It is briefly touched up on in the film, and I wonder if you could elaborate.
That is kind of where the whole idea for the film started. This gamer that dropped out of high school and became a drone pilot. When he was 19 he was an instructor for other drone pilots. And there was a scheme of getting points for killing people on the other side of the world that kind of sparked the idea of doing this film.
When I started looking at how the military is in close co-operation with the entertainment industry, getting consultancy on the best interface on the drone program, the best joystick. The US military has had a long history of using video games as a recruiting tool. They have their game, America's Army, that was solely created for this purpose. It went from being an American recruiting tool to becoming one of the more popular online games, at one point nine million people.
This is what I consider, a fun fact, barely has anything to do with what we are talking about, but Eric Prince, from Blackwater, has just came out with a game called Blackwater.
War in this sense has become more of a game, and one wonders about the erosion of empathy if the line between entertainment and warfare continues to blur...Although, I wonder if there is more time to think, if war becomes a more remote or 'office job' in front of monitors than in the field.
Some of the drone pilots do actually acquire a sort of intimacy with people that they have observed for months. But then they have to hover above afterwards and watch the atrocities and hell that they have created on the ground, and I think that those images stick with you for a long time. It is very interesting to see how the language of war is always important. How do you prime people to kill, and how do you deal with the killings. And to see how this language is worked into the program. People who are killed are called 'bug splat.' People who are injured with shrapnel are called 'squirters.'
Talking to Brandon and Michael [Haas, former US Air Force Drone Pilot] and occasionally they would slip and call the people on the ground, 'it.' Subtle things like this it has been very chilling. I think both Brandon and Michael they have not quite figured out how to train and prepare the drone pilots for what they were going to do. Which I think is one of the reasons why Brandon has been struggling so much; his life has been devastated by what he has experienced.
I believe the drone program has gotten better since then, as far as preparing and dealing with the aftermath of it on pilots, but it is interesting to see how hard it is for the Air Force to get enough drone pilots to join and how to keep them. It is interesting.
The phrase Post Traumatic Stress Disorder seems like the wrong one, as this is all happening In Situ, these guys leave their booth after a shift, but 12 hours later they are back there.
Both Brandon and Michael would go home and game, with the same headset.
In the film, you use clips from the media to represent the Administration's side of the equation, that drones strikes are cheaper and safer than putting boots on the ground. Was it difficult to get official interviews for the purposes of the film?
No one from the Obama Administration wanted to comment on anything, or meet us, or interact in interviews. The closest we got to an official was John Bellinger, who was a former legal advisor for the US State Department. He has an interesting background, laying the framework for justifying using drones. But I do think the official story is well represented in the media, and that is why we used it in the film.
Can you comment on things happing right at this moment, with so many targets killed, and the hydra effect in full display, making the situation worse, when up pops ISIS. You create more extreme combatants by the very tactics used to mitigate the problem.
ISIS is, agreed, the worst example that we have seen in blowback of some very wrong decisions. It is almost unbelievable with Iraq not to grasp the consequences of essentially firing the whole army, it is like a bad B-movie. And it is interesting to see the Obama Administration criticizing the Bush Administration for not thinking about this, and for not seeing what the consequences would be.
It is very difficult for us to learn from history and to see the longterm consequences of what we are doing. To kill thousands of civilians and to not consider that this might increase extremism and the threat of terrorism is a very shortsighted and dangerous tactic.
Do you feel that the whole drone situation, as it moves from the United States into the rest of the world, is it apolitical in the sense of the left or the right, and simply an economical issue?
I think it is extremely important that we deal with this issue right now. The urgency on this is quite alarming. What happens after Obama? I think that the drones are such a tempting, sexy, cheap, sort-term tactic that is easy to sell. It takes sacrifice of your own soldiers out of war, it makes it easier to kill, you don't have the sight of people coming home in body bags, and the American population thinks, of course, if you look at Vietnam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, it is brilliant.
But in the long term, it is starting to blow back. Of course there are consequences; to go and kill so many civilians, especially outside declared war zones. To me, that is very dangerous that there is no proper debate about this.
With all the American justifications on the War on Terror: 9/11, bombing, atrocities and so forth. Putting nearly invisible 'birds' in the sky that could potentially blow up anything at any time is such a equal to or larger act of terror. People in affected countries now cab always feel they are up there, and it is a moral equivalency that nobody is addressing.
One thing that is rarely discussed in the mainstream media is how the drones are actually terrorizing the whole population. Getting the stories of children that are leaving under Drones in Waziristan and Yemen, and they are afraid to go outside, they are afraid to play. The stories of doctors meeting with children that have no joy in their eyes, they are just terrorized. Panic attacks, screaming until they throw up. It is very easy to imagine for anyone, drones circling and constantly killing.
It destroys whole communities in Waziristan, tribal areas where they meet in these gatherings to discuss conflicts, that is how they solve community related things. They can no longer meet in that way. It has happened several times. Just learning more about what is really going on, the nature of how drones are really being used, especially by the CIA. If you go back to how the War on Terror as been fought, millions of people have been killed since 9/11. For what? It hasn't made us safer. It is been a disaster.
I do not think we are hearing the right questions asked, and I do not think we are looking for the right solutions. I am concerned if we keep going down this path that it is a very dark future. Nobody properly asks, "Why do they hate us so much." US Foreign policy has destabilized the region for decades now, and somebody is making a lot of money.
It's a dark subject for such a sunny day, but I appreciate you sitting down with me and having a talk about it.
Thanks for doing this.
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