sound of terror: phenomenology of a drone strike_nasser hussain_boston review 2013-10-15.pdf

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The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a DroneStrikeNasser HussainOctober 16, 2013

The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death." This account of what adrone feels and sounds like from the ground comes from David Rohde, a journalist who was kidnapped and heldby the Taliban for seven months in 2008. Yet this kind of report rarely registers in debates in the United States

Nasser Hussain is Associate Professor in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought atAmherst College and author of The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law.

in Boston Review
http://www.bostonreview.net/author/nasser-hussainhttp://www.bostonreview.net/world/hussain-drone-phenomenology?utm_source=Newsletter%3A+Oct+22%2C+2013&utm_campaign=Oct+22+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_medium=email#http://www.bostonreview.net/world/hussain-drone-phenomenology?utm_source=Newsletter%3A+Oct+22%2C+2013&utm_campaign=Oct+22+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_medium=email#http://www.bostonreview.net/world/hussain-drone-phenomenology?utm_source=Newsletter%3A+Oct+22%2C+2013&utm_campaign=Oct+22+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_medium=email#http://www.bostonreview.net/world/hussain-drone-phenomenology?utm_source=Newsletter%3A+Oct+22%2C+2013&utm_campaign=Oct+22+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_medium=email#http://www.bostonreview.net/world/hussain-drone-phenomenology?utm_source=Newsletter%3A+Oct+22%2C+2013&utm_campaign=Oct+22+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_medium=email#


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over the use of drones. Instead these debates seem to have reached an impasse. Opponents of drone strikes say hey violate international law and have caused unacknowledged civilian deaths. Proponents insist they actually ave the lives of both U.S. soldiers, who would otherwise be deployed in dangerous ground operations, and of

civilians, because of the drones capacity to survey and strike more precisely than combat. If the alternative is aprolonged and messy ground operation, the advantage of drone strikes in terms of casualties is indisputable, andt is not my intention to dispute it here.

But the terms of this debate give a one-sided view of both the larger financial and political costs of drones, as well

as the less than lethal but nonetheless chronic and intense harm continuous strikes wage on communities. Thismyopia restricts our understanding of the full effects of drones; in order to widen our vision, I provide aphenomenology of drone strikes, examining both how the world appears through the lens of a drone camera andhe experience of the people on the ground. What is it like to watch a drones footage, or to wait below for it totrike? What does the drones camera capture, and what does it occlude?

Contemporary drones introduce an unparalleled capacity to see and survey. The use of unmanned aircraft datesback at least to the Vietnam War, and missiles have long been used to target individuals or discrete locations.They started out as fairly basic surveillance aircraft, first used in the mid-1990s in the wars in the formerYugoslavia, but by early 2001, drones were equipped with firepower. Since their first appearances in the war onerror, in the first two years after 9/11, drones have been regarded as a distinctly global resource, the means by

which the war on terrorism goes global. The first-generation Predator, pressed into service after 9/11 inAfghanistan, was armed with two Hellfire missiles that had a limited range of 400 nautical miles. All this changedn 2007 with the second generation Reaper: equipped with four Hellfire missiles as well as two 500lb laser guided

bombs, and able to fly over 16 hours fully armed for up to 3200 nautical miles, this new drone is the first purposebuilt hunter-killer UAV. The Reaper also has an all-weather, day or night radar, linked to a sensor ball thathouses image-intensified and infrared cameras. And even this impressive surveillance ability will pale in

comparison to the new generation drone called Gorgon Stare, which will increase the single video feed of theReaper to 12 and eventually to 65 video feeds, so that a drone which now stares down at a single house or vehiclecould keep constant watch on nearly everything that moves within an area of 1.5 square miles. The year after that,he capability will double to 3 square miles.

n addition to their military prowess, the remote operation of drones from control centers thousands of milesaway has made them legendary, the stuff of science fiction. The pilots who command the drone and fire itsmissiles do so based on a real-time video feed. So no matter how expansive the drones vision, or how natural themages it relays seem, all this seeing and killing is based on what can be seen through a camera. Drone strike

ootage is not a film in any common sense of the term, but it is still video footage, shot from a camera and visibleon a screen, and its filmic qualities demand attention.

What the Camera Can See

There is a longstanding intimacy between air power and the visual field. Aerial vision, from the primitiveconditions of pilots flying bi-planes over deserts and mountains, to the infrared camera footage from a droneseye, belong to what Martin Jay calls the scopic regimes of modernity. Paul Virilios classic War and Cinema: ThLogistics of Perception was written before the advent of drones, but its general argument is more applicable today han ever. For Virilio, the story of twentieth-century war is inseparable from evolving cinema techniques. From



elescopic viewfinders atop rifles to sophisticated cybernetic cameras, optical devices mediate and produce the actof taking aim, aligning an imaginary axis from eye to object. As Virilio explains, the act of taking aim is ageometrification of looking, a way of technically aligning ocular perception along an imaginary axis that used to beknown in French as the faith line ( ligne de foi ). . . to denote the ideal alignment of a look which, starting fromhe eye, passed through the peep-hole and the sights and on to the target object. Aerial vision occupies a special

place within Virilios narrative: At the turn of the century, cinema and aviation seem to form a single moment. By 1914, aviation was ceasing to be strictly a means of flying and breaking records; it was becoming one way, orperhaps even the ultimate way, of seeing.

We have become too accustomed to seeing from the air, which violates all the familiar geometry and perspectiveof our mundane, grounded vision. The exhilaration of the birds-eye view, or the gods-eye view, so palpable inearly accounts of flying, stems from the possibility of outstripping human limitations. But in another respect,aviation is very much tied to the modern mode of seeing, because from the very beginning it has been linked tophotographic and cinematographic representation. Shooting a film, or focusing on a target, are not cheap puns,but reminders of a shared genealogical origin. Indeed, this way of looking is so naturalized that we forget thateeing through an aperture produces a particular and partial visual construction.

Aerial vision at once expands the range of view and hones in on a perceived target. But this focus inwards, thisclaim of precise aim, is not just one among other ways of looking. Rather, the accuracy of the drones eyetructures more than vision; it shapes the way we think about, talk about, and evaluate a bombing. We focus in onhe target, the moment of impact. We dispute how contained or collateral the damage was, how many civilians

died alongside the chosen target. These questions begin to eclipse all other questions about the global military apparatus that makes the strike possible or about civilian injury that goes beyond body counts.

Let us then take a closer look at the visual regime of the drone. Let us see what a drone sees (and what it does not).Here is a representative clip , chosen more or less randomly from the many available online.

While many commentators worry about the video-game style warfare of such footage, the comparison is bothexaggerated and inapt. Contrary to drone footage, video games offer a deeply immersive environment in which ateast the players virtual life is at stake. Perhaps what fuels the comparison of drone footage to video games is the

aura of detachment they share. The worry is that detachment eases the ability to kill.

n his study On Killing , Dave Grossman, a colonel in the military, argues persuasively for a correlation betweendistance and the ease of killing.

Like the overhead shot in film, which excludesface-to-face dialogue, policing action both beginsand ends with the criminalization of the enemy.

On the one hand, the video feed of drone footage transmitted to a distant location, precisely fits Grossmansmaximum range category: a range at which the killer is unable to perceive his individual victims without using

UAV Strike on Insurgents
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ-dNu5uOQc



ome form of mechanical assistancebinoculars, radar, periscope, remote TV camera, and so on. At thisdistance, Grossman reports, I have not found a single instance of individuals who have refused to kill the enemy under these circumstances, nor have I found a singe instance of psychiatric trauma associated with this type of killing. On the other hand, the drones ability to zoom in to a sight line just a few hundred feet above the groundproduces images of startling intimacy. In the end, we should be less concerned with how the mediation of thedrones camera increases or decreases the pilots willingness to firesince that decision is dispersed along acomplex chain of command, referred to in military circles as the kill chainthan with how the purely visualquality reinforces certain conditions of control and asymmetric violence.

Looking at the clip again, one element is obviously missing: sound. Although the pilots can hear groundcommands, there is no microphone equivalent to the micro-scopic gaze of the drones camera. This mute world of dumb figures moving about on a screen has particular consequences for how we experience the image. As MichelChion notes in The Voice in Cinema , although sound or voice is easily swallowed up by the image, it nonethelesstructures the image: only the creators of a films soundrecordist, sound effects person, mixer, directorknow hat if you alter or remove these sounds, the image is no longer the same . In the case of the drone strike footage,he lack of synchronic sound renders it a ghostly world in which the figures seem unalive, even before they are

killed. The gaze hovers above in silence. The detachment that critics of drone operations worry about comes

partially from the silence of the footage.

The camera angle is always the same: the overhead shot. By definition, the overhead shot excludes thehot/reverse shot, the series of frontal angles and edits that make up face-to-face dialogue. With the overheadhot, there is no possibility of returning the gaze. The overhead shot neither invites nor permits participation in its

visual economy. It is the filmic cognate of asymmetric war.

Asymmetric war is typically a conflict between a regular army and a guerilla force, but could describe any conflictn which one side cannot retaliate in kind. The lasting insight of Schmitts evaluation of air power in The Nomohe Earth (1950) is that the technological imbalance inherent in the use of air power transforms conflicts by

adding an element of policing. The introduction of air power combined specific spatial transformations within aglobal nomos with changes in the technology of weaponry. Schmitt saw with prescient clarity that air war wouldnot only create an intensification of the technical means of destruction and the disorientation of space, butalso intensify the problem of unequal sides, and allow the dominant side to re-label enemies as criminals. Schmittunderstood that air power would create a world in which those who command the sky could police and punishhose who do not. For Schmitt, this widening gap is both the cause and result of a juridification of war, a shiftowards conceptualizing war as a policing activity of criminals:

Both sides have a specific relation to the types of weapon. If the weapons are conspicuously unequal, then

the mutual concept of war conceived of in terms of an equal plane is lacking. To war on both sides belongsa certain chance of victory. Once that ceases to be the case, the opponent becomes nothing more than anobject of violent measures. Then the antithesis between the warring parties is increased exponentially.From the distinction between power and law, the vanquished are displaced into a bellum intestinum(internal war). The victors consider their superiority in weaponry to be an indication of their justa causaand declare the enemy to be a criminal because it no longer is possible to realize the concept of justushostis .

Aerial bombin of those who have no chance to retaliate is not a war but an une ual exchan e which b its ver



nature accelerates the process through which war becomes a policing action and the adversary becomes a criminalor a mere object of violent reprisal. Policing action both begins and ends with the criminalization of the enemy.The overhead shot, coeval with air power itself, both produces and solidifies asymmetry and criminalization,which in turn produces a moral and legal justification of the violence.

The public availability of the drones footage deserves as much attention as its diegetic world. What is the video of

upposedly classified strikes doing on YouTube? Who put it up? These clips are released by the Department of Defense through its Defense Video and Imagery Distribution System (DVIDS) Web site. With over ten million hitsonline, the clips are consumed voraciously, and attract a community of viewers (judging from the commentprofiles, mostly men) who comment on what they portray and inform each other of new postings. Given thedistinct action in these clips and the obsessive interest in them, some commentators have called the phenomenondrone porn." This offensive moniker does not so much equate the subject matter with that of a snuff film as offera clue to the structure of the videos. Just as pornography caters to masculine desire, and the so-called money shotor male orgasm structures the film and retrospectively casts the action leading up to it as anticipation, so theexperience of watching the drone strike footage is characterized by anticipation of the coming explosion, the

moment of the strike. But while discussions of drone strikes in the United States focus on the precision of impact,he experience of drone strikes from the ground cannot be understood as a singular moment but as a structuringeality. And it is to that reality that I now turn.

What The Camera Cant See

f drone operators can see but not hear the world below them, the exact oppositeis true for people on the ground.Because drones are able to hover at or above 30 thousand feet, they are mostly invisible to the people below them.But they can be heard. Many people from the tribal areas of Pakistan (FATA) describe the sound as a low-grade,perpetual buzzing, a signal that a strike could occur at any time. The locals call the drones machar, mosquitos.Because the drone can surveil the area for hours at a time, and because each round of surveillance may or may notesult in a strike, the fear and anxiety among civilians is diffuse and chronic.

While drone strike footage has entered our culture as fantasy, drones have entered these regions as psychologicalrauma. In interviews, humanitarian workers, doctors and psychologists all attest to widespread occurrence of

PTSD and anticipatory anxiety. Recent studies go beyond the disputation of casualty counts to a more thoroughexamination of life under the constant threat of drone strikes, offering ample evidence of a severely traumatizedpopulation, living under constant fear of the next strike. Living Under Drones, the comprehensiveStanford/NYU study of the impact of drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan, includes first-hand interviewswith many witnesses and survivors of the strikes. The words of one interviewee reveal an almost textbook

definition of anticipatory trauma: God knows whether theyll strike again or not. But theyre always surveying us,heyre always over us, and you never know when theyre going to strike and attack. While in law, the term

imminent is frequently used for justification, here imminent" takes on an altogether different and terrifyingmeaning, one distinguished by sound: one man described the reaction to the sound of the drones as a wave of error coming over the community. In another testimony, Hisham Abrar states, when children hear the drones,hey get really scared, and they can hear them all the time.

The same is true in the other countries subject to repeated strikes. The resulting consequences have been



, ,huttered into bankruptcy. In April of 2011, a young Yemeni author who spent time as an exchange student in the

United States testified before the Senate, described his first-hand experience of a drone strike: They [the locals]were moving erratically and frantically pointing toward the sky. Based on their past experiences with dronetrikes, they told us that the thing hovering above usout of sight and making a strange humming noisewas an

American drone. My heart sank. I was helpless.

Emphasizing the diffuse but chronic deteriorationof life offers a thicker definition of civilian harm,and dismantles the visual regime of the drone, itswill to omniscience and precision.

Sight on one side and sound on the other. Focus on one side and diffusion on the other. It is precisely thisdistribution of senses that produces the assertion of pinpoint accuracy and the disavowal of widespread harm. As Iuggested earlier, the visual regime of the drones camera extends well beyond the video it produces, structuringarger discussions of legitimacy and efficacy. For instance, in testimony before the U.S. Senate reported by he Times , Retired Colonel Martha McSully insists drones offered more oversight and precision because they

could hover over a target, with the ability to abort a strike until the last second, and with the chain of commandand lawyers watching. The same prolonged hovering that produces the terrifying buzzing here adds oversight toight, combining surveillance with legal scrutiny. But the layers of supervision effectively evacuate the world of ound and the interpersonal reality that sound produces; to argue about how precise or imprecise, focused or

unfocused, such strikes are is to remain within a visual economy. These arguments, preoccupied with casualty igures, tend to dominate critical commentary in the West. While outlandish claims by the administration that

here hasnt been a single collateral death in Pakistan from the August 2010 to July 2011 have been repudiatedby various organizations, disputes over the exact number of civilian deaths remain. Emphasizing instead thediffuse but chronic deterioration of life offers a thicker definition of civilian harm, and dismantles, in part, thevisual regime of the drone, its will to omniscience and precision. It also begins to dispel the fantasy of air power ingeneral.

But another major contributor to the dominance of air power in general is the idea that such power provides aneat alternative to the messiness of ground forces: either because aircraft can operate in areas where, for whatevereason, it is not possible to send troops, or because air power provides an alternative in areas where, for financial

and strategic reasons, the United States wishes to scale back its presence (for instance, in the debate over theroop surge in Afghanistan during the summer of 2010, the Biden plan called for strategic air strikes throughouthe country in lieu of additional troops). In this vision, as with previous hopes for air power, selective drone

attacks are seen as the substitute for ground troops from the horn of Africa to the mountains of central Asia.

n reality, drone strikes often entail an increase in the infrastructure of ground support, in terms of personnel, theneed for landing strips and bases, and an intelligence network for locating targets . Indeed, the fact that the actual
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