Unmanned: America's Drone Wars (2013) Reviews

• Brilliant

  among-the-wildflowers2014-01-07

  As the result of a synchronicity I found out about this film just as I was interested in finding out more about this topic. It was eye-opening, life-changing, truthful, honest, shocking and most importantly, inspired me to spread the awareness about this issue to others. The stories of innocent people who were affected by these drones were amazing to hear and really had an effect. Documentaries like this one are great and really do make a difference. I think the only problem is that it's always a certain kind of people who watch them in the first place. Those people who watch them are the type who would care anyway. Somehow we need to find out a way to get to those who don't.

• Murder as policy

  hof-42013-11-14

  In a very sad sense, this is the chronicle of the complete moral decay of a great country, ours. We are at present governed by people devoid of any vestige of a moral compass, in particular by a president that not only feels entitled to assassinate anybody, anywhere, anytime but seems to think that murder is cute; Mr Obama has joked in public about these killings. As reported in the news, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner May 1, 2010 President Obama noted that in the audience were the Jonas brothers. "Sasha and Malia are huge fans," he said, "but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming." "The audience laughed approvingly," the news sources reported, which illustrates the present corruption of the press and the disappearance of real journalism. Naturally, the government, from the President down has consistently lied about collateral damage from these strikes (by and large, the dead have been unrelated to any form of terrorism, many of them women and children). This documentary focuses on drone operators, on several cases of innocent people assassinated by drones and on the reactions to these killings, especially in Pakistan. It is a must see; it is available on the Internet. As long as this murder campaign goes on the prestige of the US will shrink even more in the eyes of the world and legions of mortal enemies of our country will be created.

• The Monetary And Human Cost Of "Anti-Terror" Drone Warfare

  virek2132016-04-29

  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.