Hood was fascinated by the blurring of lines between good and evil in some of his previous movies like Tsotsi (2005), for which he won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. ![]() They brought in the South African Gavin Hood to direct. He was also interested in the mental health of the characters his films portrayed.īut Hibbert’s script never got made by BBC Films, and the project ended up with Entertainment One, usually known as eOne. Hibbert had won several awards for his 2009 Irish film Five Minutes of Heaven (directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel), dealing with issues of political violence and revenge. It was in this context that Guy Hibbert developed a script about the morality of drone warfare for BBC Films. A group of 45 former US military personnel publicly appealed to US drone pilots to refuse to carry out further deadly missions that risked killing innocent civilians. In 2014, 12 civilians were killed en route to a wedding in Yemen’s al-Baydah province.īy June 2015, it had been estimated that the death toll of US drone strikes had exceeded 6,000 in attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. In November 2008, a US strike supposedly on the Taliban near Kandahar, Afghanistan, killed 37 civilians at a wedding party. Over the years, drone attacks have become notorious. They are flown by a crew consisting of a pilot, a sensor operator, and an intelligence coordinator, and they became central weapons in the American-led War on Terror after the attacks of 11 September 2001. The MQ-9 Reaper could carry up to four Hellfire or Sidewinder missiles for 14 hours at 50,000ft. A new generation of Reaper or Predator drones took the technology from surveillance to a hunter-killer role. In the next two decades, UAVs – now popularly known as ‘drones’ – developed rapidly. ![]() According to later reports, ‘at least one UAV was airborne at all times during Desert Storm’. The Gulf War of 1991 has been called ‘the first UAV war’. The next stage of development was also led by Israel, which began to use UAVs not only for surveillance but as part of electronic warfare and as decoys to distract enemy anti-aircraft fire from manned aircraft. They were primitive devices, only capable of carrying small loads, but some of them were successfully used by the Israelis in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It was not until the 1970s, however, that the top-secret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US began to develop prototype UAVs for surveillance.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |