'National Bird' shines light on
secretive drone wars
Kennebeck, who was just starting research for "National Bird."
"People were commenting about the drone war but you couldn't really get access to people who worked in the program." She managed to track down Ling, Heather Linebaugh, a former drone operative suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and "Dan," a civilian intelligence analyst who was the target of an Espionage Act investigation. Kennebeck traveled with Ling to Afghanistan to meet the innocent victims of the 2010 attack, adults and children who had lost loved ones, not to mention limbs. - 'Drones are terror' - The aim, she says, was to start a debate that had been utterly absent from the public conversation, about whether people wanted drone warfare waged on their behalf and -- if they did -- how to regulate it. "The question is how precise and surgical is it really to drop a bomb on a house? Do you really know with 100 percent certainty who is inside and who you are killing?" she asks. According to US public policy think tank New America, 86 countries have some drone technology. Earlier this year Nigeria became the eighth country to have used armed drones in combat. The Lebanese Islamist militant group Hezbollah has also used them. "This is our taxpayer money. We are paying to have this happen so at least we should say we are okay with this, or not okay with it," US-based Ines Hofmann Kanna, who produced "National Bird," told AFP. "We're not even discussing it, really. That's a problem. "The 92-minute "National Bird" is being released as Obama prepares to make way for a successor who will be in a position to re-evaluate the moral case for drones, and their efficacy in warfare. "I'd like to see whoever comes into office watch this film and understand that, from the ground, drones are terror," says Ling. "If you're walking through a garden with your grandmother and you don't know within the next 10 seconds whether you're going to see your grandmother in pieces, that's called terror."