## THE GENERAL'S STORK

## Heba Y. Amin

During the first Gulf War, the media presented a new perspective of warfare detached from human experience by broadcasting their fetishization of weaponry and technology directly into peoples' homes. Harun Farocki's critique on the normalization of military image technologies and the aestheticization of war alluded to a new visual lexicon of wars. Not only were machines speaking to machines through algorithms that shaped our understanding of territory, but they eventually became active agents in physically transforming  them.  How  can  we,  through  artistic  practices, expose  the  political  implications  of  the  production  of  visual data  permeating  contemporary  perceptions  of  geographical frameworks?

Since the late nineteenth century, aerial imaging technologies have put forth an alienating aesthetic order directly correlated to the colonial project and its machines of destruction. The bird's-eye view became a symbol of modernity as early aerial photographs played a significant role in shaping and implementing Europe's vision of the modern nation-state. Indeed, the new cult of the machine emerged from a colonial framework which continues to  be  reenacted  and  implemented  through  image  production. As aerial technologies advance in sophisticated ways, military powers maintain the 'objectivity' of images constructed from the perspective of semi-autonomous mechanical birds.

In 2013, I was captivated by a viral media story about a stork that  had  been  detained  and  accused  of  espionage.  It  inspired an  investigative  journey  that  examined  the  politics  of  aerial surveillance -against the backdrop of biblical prophecies, drone warfare, and colonial narratives -from a bird's-eye view. The research unfolded over many years and relays the extent to which Western military techniques of reconnaissance have, through the topographical quartering of the Middle East, pre-determined the contemporary geopolitics of the region.

Today, drones are increasingly designed to look more like real birds. We are aspiring towards artificial intelligence through 'bionic thinking,' or biologically inspired engineering. Machines are not only dictated by algorithms but will also be indistinguishable from the real living thing. It is therefore not so strange that Heba Y. Amin, Artistic rendering of first aerial photographs of Palestine (ca. 1900-20), Jordan Valley north of Jericho, 1500m , 2020. Courtesy of the artist. (ref. Matson G. Eric and Edith Photograph Collection).

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Much of the photographic surveys of Palestine at the turn of the twentieth-century focused on the landscape and gave the overall impression that no one lived there. Through the documentation of geographic transformations, these aerial images - alongside the systematic cataloguing of flora - effectively visualize a political shift, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the establishment of the British Mandate in 1920, and the establishment of Jewish settlements. In this context, these photographs disclose how political ideologies are inscribed into technologies of seeing and visualising that are otherwise presented as being self-evident.

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Heba Y. Amin, Artistic rendering of first aerial photographs of Palestine (ca. 1900-20), Jericho Road from 3000 meters , 2020. Courtesy of the artist. (ref. Matson G. Eric and Edith Photograph Collection).

The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph collection originates from the American Colony (1881-1934), a Christian utopian society founded by Chicago residents Anna and Horatio Spafford in Jerusalem 1881. The society was later joined by members of the Swedish Evangelical Church. Housed in the U.S. Library of Congress, the Collection is made up of over 22,000 glass and film photographic negatives and transparencies. See https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/matpc Heba Y. Amin, As Birds Flying , 2016. 7'11' Video Still. Courtesy of the artist.

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As Birds Flying (2016) is a short allegorical film that uses found drone footage (including aerial views of savannas and wetlands, and Israeli settlements in Galilea) and audio sequences from the 1995 film Birds of Darkness , starring Adel Imam and directed by Sharif Arafah.

a farmer in southern Egypt would be suspicious of a bird with an electronic device attached to its body.

Below is a transcript of an artistic lecture that has, since its first  iteration,  expanded  as  an  ongoing  project  which  includes performance, works on paper, archival research material, film and the book Heba Y. Amin: The General's Stork, edited by Anthony Downey (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020).

I

We live in a risk society, a moment of global hysteria. A time, in which everything is a construct of fear, where responses are formulated according to the phobias that define our social world. In such a world, the narrative becomes everything: it is power. Our paranoia leads us to question even the construct of our visual realities. Our visual paradigms are drastically changing as we've begun to dismantle the linear perspective. The mathematics of art as put-forth by Italian Renaissance painters and architects, no longer deals with the horizon or the vanishing point but rather the detached observant gaze of the aerial view.

The aerial view has become the new norm as technological tools  of  surveillance  become  seamlessly  embedded  within  our contemporary landscapes. From the Orientalist depiction of the desert  of  nineteenth-century  aerial  photography  in  the  Middle East to the role that satellite imagery of the 1991 Gulf war has played in transforming war reportage, the problematic practices in landscape surveillance perpetuate the narrative of imperialism through the technology of warfare. The language of occupation and colonization has been written into the visualization of landscape. 1

Early twentieth-century geographers were intrigued by this new perspective as a means of territorial evaluation. The Royal Geographical Society convened in 1920 to discuss British military strategies and opportunities brought forth by aerial technologies for land expansion, particularly in Europe's new territories on the African continent. It was surveying landscapes not only for visualizing  the  colonies,  but  also  for  administrative  control and imperial cataloguing. 2 The  Society  recognized  the  power of  aerial  photography for advancing scientific research, using Egypt and Palestine as testing grounds for perfecting their survey techniques. As early as 1916, surveying and mapping technologies were used to uncover Turkish systems and infrastructures in Gaza in preparation for warfare. 3

As war became dictated by the needs of technology, conquest from the sky transformed Western warfare into an imbalanced spectacle of high-tech weaponry. 4 Techno-aesthetics became inherently tied to the greater Middle East as landscapes of destruction -complete with trenches, tunnels, minefields and communication structures -became the image of a new regime of terror. Aeroplanes further transformed the aestheticisation of geography to another level of  domination: aeromobilities not only changed the territorial sovereignty of airspace, but machines altered our contemporary imaginaries and the very nature of seeing. Paul Virilio writes of 'the deadly harmony that always establishes itself between the functions of eye and weapon,' when missiles and bombs are fitted with cameras and suddenly 'open their eyes.' 5

II

In 2013, Egypt made worldwide headlines for a story about a stork. It  was  caught and detained after a local resident identified an electronic device attached to its body and suspected it of espionage. It was accused of being a Zionist spy and later imprisoned. Once it was broadcast in the media, it became a spectacle that was in keeping with the frenzy of the events unfolding in Egypt. 6

At this time, Egypt was in the middle of a grave crisis. The elected  president  Mohammad  Morsi  and  senior  figure  of  the Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown and jailed by the military on July 3, 2013. In the two months since Morsi was toppled, hundreds of his followers have been killed in clashes with the army and police, including during an event that the Human Rights Watch has called 'the most serious incident of mass unlawful killings in modern Egyptian history' where, it states, at least 1000 people were killed on August 14, 2013. 7 Furthermore, an insurgency has flared in the Sinai Peninsula.

On Sunday Sept 1, 2013 Nature Conservation Egypt receives an email:

'To whom it may concern:

We have found out from the media, that a white stork with our satellite tracking device was caught in Egypt near Qena and it is in captivity:

Could you get in touch with the authorities and inform them, that this is a stork from Hungary and the device is a wildlife tracking device we attached to it to follow the migration of the bird.

Even you can find the details of the bird and the tracking data on our satellite tracking website.' 8

The stork was a native of Hungary and was following the Nile River on his migration toward the Lake Victoria basin in East Africa when villagers in Qena spotted him at rest with a white satellite tracker fixed to its body. The bird was one of 115 migrating birds being tracked by a consortium of European wildlife organisations. Qena, a small city in southern Egypt, is most famous for its close proximity  to  the  ancient  temples  of  Dendara,  and  today  has become a major traffic route between Upper Egypt and the Red Sea. Seemingly distant from the political events unfolding around the country, the city has its own complicated history that includes an elaborate story about a secret American military airbase.

Here is an account from Larry Grinnell, technical communicator for the U.S. military, whose role was to perform occasional preventive maintenance inspections and certify the destruction of radio operators' classified documents.

This is taken from his personal website:

The 1st Comm had an ongoing mission sending people to a classified  location  somewhere  in  the  middle  east,  simply known to  us  as…Site  Alpha.  As  it  turns  out,  this  was  the forward base that launched the rescue attempt to bring back the American hostages in Iran, taken when the US Embassy was invaded in 1979. The rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, failed completely due to many factors that are probably still being discussed today.

The helicopters were sent from the military base in Qena and all encountered technical problems: eight helicopters were sent, one encountered hydraulic problems, another got caught in a cloud of fine sand, a third showed cracks in the rotor blade, and lastly one of the helicopters crashed into a transport aircraft. Eight Americans and one Iranian citizen were killed. 9

No one was supposed to know where [the base] was until they were under way, unless they had the appropriate clearances and need to know…Gee, I thought, just having seen King Tut's riches, this was pretty amazing to be going to the country where he came from. We finally touched down, after going around A detailed account of Menes' release is relayed in an interview with Haitham Mossad, ornithologist and member of Nature Conservation Egypt , detailing his account of getting Menes the stork released. See: Anthony Downey, ed., Heba Y. Amin: The General's Stork (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), 46-50.

Documentation of the stork called Menes after he was caught and detained on suspicion of espionage and of his release by Haitham Mossad in September 2013. Photo courtesy of Haitham Mossad.

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Map of location of Dandarah Temple complex in Egypt (@2020 Google), a wall detail (courtesy of Olaf Tausch) and a photograph of the American military airbase in Wadi Qena used by the US Armed Forces as part of Operation Eagle Claw in 1980.

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German apothecary, inventor and photographer Julius Neubronner with his pigeon camera. Photo courtesy of Kronberg Archive.

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The bionic 'SmartBird' developed by the German industrial control and automation company Festo.

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three times due to difficult weather at the site, and when I got to the open doorway, my heart sunk. There it was. Miles and miles of miles and miles. This was a real desert with basically nothing.

I quickly found out that Site Alpha was a former Soviet air base, built in the days when the Soviets and the Egyptians were fast friends…Officially, it was known as Wadi Qena… We called it Bum F**k Egypt (BFE for short). Along with Thule, Greenland and Minot, North Dakota, BFE was an often mythical place that military training instructors threatened to send you if you didn't get with the program. I think we even had a sign outside Base Operations that said 'Welcome to BFE,' but when local Egyptian military folks and civilian dignitaries visited, the true meaning of BFE was masked with the acronym 'Beautiful, Friendly Egypt.' I don't think anyone was fooled, but we did at least try to play the game. 10

The  operation  failed  to  save  the  embassy  hostages  and  was eventually aborted. The hostages were then scattered around Iran, making another rescue attempt impossible. It was Anwar Sadat, Egypt's president at the time, who leaked the information about the American military base in Egypt. The deal was that the Americans would use the Egyptian facilities to introduce land-based American airpower to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. This was not a surprising move considering the development of aerial technologies in the region.

III

A German engineer first attached a camera to a pigeon in 1908 to  take  aerial  photographs. Dr. Julius Neubronner patented the 'pigeon-cam,' a camera attached to a homing pigeon activated by a timing mechanism. Neubronner was an apothecary near Frankfurt and  started  receiving  his  prescriptions  from  a  sanatorium  in Falkenstein using pigeon post. He then thought, if a pigeon can carry drugs, surely it can carry a camera. He fitted a light miniature camera with a harness weighing up to 75g, and the birds were already accustomed to carrying such weight. The imperial patent office accepted his invention which he titled 'method and device for photographing sections of terrain from the bird's eye perspective.' 11

It  wasn't  long  before  his  pigeon-cam  inspired  the  German military intelligence to do the same. It was, in fact, reported that the German Army was training pigeons for photography in 1932 leading up to the Second World War. It was only a matter of time until real animals started being replaced by artificial ones.

In  August  2012,  a  suspected  surveillance  drone  crashed  in Balochistan  Province,  Pakistan.  According  to  an  eyewitness account,  it  landed  near  the  Frontier  Corps  headquarters  in Chaman, a bordering township with Afghanistan. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, this particular region has seen the heaviest bombardment by drone strikes, with a total of 425 strikes in the last decade and between 2501-4003 casualties, 84 of which are identified as members of al-Qaeda. 12

The robotic  bird  resembled  a  SmartBird,  even  though  the company denies  responsibility  or  ownership.  In  a  TV  report on the incident, the reporter states in Urdu voice-over: 'From now onwards, we will have to watch the skies carefully, to check whether a bird is real, or it is a spy.' 13 SmartBird is designed by a research laboratory at Festo, a German industrial control and automation company based in Esslingen am Neckar. The laboratory  specialises  in  lightweight  material  and  advanced pneumatics.  The  movements  of  the  bird  have  been  precisely engineered to match the patterns of a seagull. They are exploring what they call 'bionic thinking' and their goal is to 'learn from nature, and transfer that knowledge into technology to improve the production of the future.' 14 But to what end?

## IV

Today  the  United  States  has  the  most  comprehensive  and aggressive drone program in the world, they lead the world in drone  technology.  'When  American  army  strategists  imagine what drones will be like in twenty-five years, they begin by getting an  infographist  to  create  a  composite  image  of  a  typical  Arab town, complete with mosque, other buildings, and palm trees.' 15 They use a so-called pattern-of-life-analysis to locate anonymous militants  based  on  evidence  collected  by  surveillance  cameras through spatiotemporal mapping, or the analysis of an individual's movements in correlation to space and time. Obviously, this is not error-free and often firing is decided on arbitrary pattern-of-life indicators and innocent people are being killed. In fact, the White House 'kill list' criteria are unknown and based on blind trust; they are tracking 'behavior' from the sky.

Moda z : 2 59

Gunsight footage of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike leaked to the public in 2010 as Collateral Murder by Chelsea Manning and the online whistleblower site Wikileaks.

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Last preparation before the first tactical mission across the Suez Canal in 1969. To the left is Major Shabtai Brill from the Israeli Intelligence Corps, an innovator of the tactical UAV.

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In  the  wake  of  Wikileaks,  and  particularly  Chelsea  Manning's disclosure of nearly 750,000 classified documents including the Baghdad airstrike video 'Collateral Murder' released on April 5,  2010,  our  exposure  to  the  causalities  of  warfare  from  the military perspective have become embedded in our contemporary consciousness. 16 Indeed, Manning's release of that particular video greatly transformed our public discourse and collective imaginaries in regards to military conduct and our role in it. Manning's leaks were an attempt to address the accountability of the system, in this case the U.S government, who not only withholds truths from the public and controls the dissemination of images, but also gets away with war crimes. The released leaks did something that military images never do -they humanized victims.

The  aftermath  of  9/11  brought  us  the  postmodern  war  and operation  'Shock  and  Awe'  where  scenes  of  violence  and destruction  from  the  aerial  bombardment  of  Iraq  in  2001 were broadcast on TV and narrated through the constructs of aesthetics. Sixteen years later, the 2017 US Shayrat missile strikes in Syria were described as 'beautiful pictures' by MSNBC's Brian Williams. 17 American military rhetoric systematically portrays warfare through aesthetics that not only glorify the destruction of Middle Eastern cities, but also reduce the casualties of civilians to faceless, abstract figures.

The exoticization of violence is embedded in the aerial image which  simultaneously  proposes  notions  of  construction  and destruction. Perhaps even more alarming is that now people are being labelled as potential threats through algorithmic processing. In other words, someone can be singled out as a potential terrorist and be arrested for it before they have even considered doing anything.  In  fact,  in  April  2017,  over  400  Palestinians  were detained based on an algorithmic determination of their possible danger. 18 This  is  not  an  exact  science,  in  the  same  way  that drone targeting is not precision warfare. The victims of war see their spaces and landscapes simultaneously through experience and through the aesthetics of the machine. Their multi-layered perception of landscape becomes like an out of body experience where witnessing one's own death is an imminent probability. 19 It was Israel who had discovered the potential of remotely piloted vehicles, after they had inherited a few machines scrapped by the Americans who, momentarily, had abandoned the development of their drone program in the 1970s. In 1969, the Israeli Air Force was using drones to photograph and monitor Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian troops, and by 1973, in the Yom Kippur War, they sent out a wave of drones to mislead enemy defenses -they were able to attack when the Egyptians used up all their artillery and were reloading. 20

This was the first time drones were officially used in battle.

## V

In 1869, W.F. Quinby of Wilmington, Delaware, invented a new and improved flying machine. Quinby states in his application that his improvements 'intended to provide an arrangement of temporary sails resembling in some respect the wings of birds.' 21 Like  Quinby,  many  before  him  attempted  to  acquire  bird-like characteristics. In fact, the bible itself has prompted many scholars and inventors to conceive of flying machines or bird-like machines inspired by the following passage from the book of Isaiah: 'As birds flying, so will the LORD of hosts protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver [it], he will pass over and preserve [it].' 22

After  taking  up  his  command  in  Cairo  in  June  1917,  Lord Allenby, the Commander- in-Chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), had been given explicit orders by the Prime Minister David Lloyd George to capture Jerusalem by Christmas. This was in the wake of two failed efforts by his predecessor, Sir Archibald Murray, to conquer Gaza, a necessary condition for the conquest of Palestine from the Ottoman Turks. Lord Allenby was a believer in bible prophecy, he was a religious man and did not want to destroy the holy places in the city of Jerusalem. He was persuaded by biblical scholars to move forward based on biblical prophecy.

Allenby ordered as many planes as possible to fly over Jerusalem. It  is  said  that  at  that  time  the  Turks  had  never  seen  so  many planes in the sky and were terrified by their presence. He ordered pilots to send down leaflets commanding the Turks to surrender. The flyers read: 'Surrender the city today, Allenby.' Allenby in Arabic, can only be written in one way: al naby (prophet or son of god). What he did not know was that the Turks also believed in an old prophecy that they would never lose the Holy City until a man of Allah came to deliver it. The Turks surrendered without firing a shot, an incredible fulfilment of Biblical prophecy which put Palestine under British mandate. The Balfour Declaration, a public statement issued by the British government in 1917, called for a Jewish homeland and set the foundation for modern Israel. In fact, the following version of the story is seldom told, probably Heba Y. Amin, The General's Stork I , 2020. 100 × 80.86cm, archival color print. Courtesy of the artist.

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Heba Y. Amin, The General's Stork II, 2020. 100 × 80.86cm, archival color print. Courtesy of the artist.

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Heba Y. Amin, The General's Stork III , 2020. 100 × 80.86cm, archival color print. Courtesy of the artist.

because in this version the sociopolitical transformation of the entire region was prompted by hens. According to the witness account  of  Major  Vivian  Gilbert  relayed  in  detail  in  his  book from 1928 called The Romance of the Last Crusade: With Allenby to Jerusalem , the city of Jerusalem was, in fact, surrendered to the general's cook who was out on a mission to fetch some eggs:

On December 9, 1917 the eggs were spoiled, so British private Merch, a cook from London, was sent off alone with his rifle to the next village to get eggs for the commander's breakfast. As an incompetent solider, he got lost in the fog and dust and accidentally stumbled on a group of men who greeted him with a set of keys. Hussein Effendi el Husseiny, the mayor of  Jerusalem,  wanted  to  surrender  the  city  to  the  cook.  'I don't want your city' he says, 'I want some eggs!'. Upon his return, private Merch relayed his amazing adventure and his commanding officer promptly declared the fall of Jerusalem. 23

Conscious of the city's special meaning for three of the world's great religions, in a deliberate act of humility and respect Allenby entered Jerusalem on foot through the Jaffa Gate on December 11, 1917. He walked to the Citadel from where he read a proclamation that made it clear he came not as a conqueror, but as a liberator. 24

Of  course,  at  this  point,  Allenby  becomes  the  man  of  the moment. All eyes were on him. His unprecedented success had made  him  out  to  be  a  hero,  a  hero  with  religious  values  and kindness. But most peculiar, however, in his media limelight is the emergence of a particular relationship with a bird.

VI

Lord Allenby had a pet marabou stork. Perhaps it was biblical fate that strengthened the bond with this bird. Perhaps the bird represents a  sort  of  triumph  that  he  holds  dear  to  his  heart,  a  symbolic embodiment of biblical prophecy. Perhaps it is not a coincidence.

But it is this precise relationship that defines the absurdity of this story, the thread that unites the sequence of events. It relays the surreal way in which history is written and highlights the details that often get left out and are eventually forgotten and erased from history, the fantasies and the truths that we hold on to. The regime of truth and the power of narrative.

So how does the story end?

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Heba Y. Amin, As Birds Flying , 2016. 7'11' Video Stills. Courtesy of the artist.

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The spy bird in Qena was given the name Menes -after an Ancient Egyptian  pharaoh  who  was  credited  with  uniting  Upper  and Lower Egypt. Menes, in fact, means 'he who endures.' However, the short-lived success story of getting Menes released was not enough to keep him safe until he exited Egypt. Upon release, he was almost instantly shot down by hunters and eaten by the very people who had questioned him in the first place. They had consumed their paranoia.

HEBA Y. AMIN is a multimedia artist and Professor of Art at the Stuttgart State Academy for Art and Design. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the Mizna journal, and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War . Heba Y. Amin was awarded the 2020 Sussmann Artist Award for artists committed to the ideals of democracy and antifascism, and was selected as a Field of Vision Fellow, NYC (2019). Amin's work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions, and her works and interventions have been covered by The New York Times, The Guardian, the Intercept , and BBC among others.

- 1 The notion of aerial photography as a construct of war was initially developed for mapping battlefields in North Africa. Dorrian, Mark, and Frédéric Pousin, eds. Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture ( London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), 188.
- 2 Dov Gavish, The Survey of Palestine under the British Mandate, 1920-1948 (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005), passim . See also, Dov Gavish 'An Account of an Unrealized Aerial Cadastral Survey in Palestine under the British Mandate,' The Geographical Journal , 153 n. 1 (March 1987): 93-98.
- 3 The Royal Geographical Society was founded in 1830 and is the UK's leading center for geographers. In its early years, the organisation was predominantly preoccupied with colonial expansion, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.
- Peter Adey, Aerial Life. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 90-91.
- 4 Italian pilot Guilio Cavotti dropped the first bombs from an aeroplane in 1911 near Tripoli during the Italo-Turkish war that transformed Ottoman Libya into an Italian colony. This event marked the first time that the aeroplane and camera came together as a new way of visualizing warfare through the machine's perspective. See, 'Libya Remembers, We Forget: These Bombs Are Not the First.' Mark Mazower, The Guardian . Accessed July 5, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/ mar/25/libya-remembers- bombs-not-first.
- 5 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception . (New York: Verso, 2009), 83.
- 6 Conal Urquhart, 'Arrested 'Spy' Stork Killed and Eaten after Release in Egypt.' The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, September 7, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/07/ arrested-spy-stork-killed-eaten-egypt.
- 7 'Egypt: Security Forces Used Excessive Lethal Force.' Human Rights Watch, April 17, 2015, www.hrw.org/news/2013/08/19/ egypt-security-forces-used-excessive-lethal-force.
- 8 This email was shared with the artist with permissions from Nature Conservation Egypt and the director of Birdlife Hungary. See the stork Menes' tracking data: https://www.satellitetracking.eu/inds/view/111.
- 9 Mark Bowden, 'The Desert One Debacle,' The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2006/05/the-desert-one-debacle/304803/.
- 10 'Meet Larry Grinnell.' Air Force Days, Part 6: Life as a Combat Communicator in the First Combat Communications Squadron: Meet Larry Grinnell, www. larrygrinnell.com/?p=1669#more-1669.
- 11 'Neubronner Applies for Pigeon Camera Patent | History Channel on Foxtel.' History Channel, June 8, 2017, www.historychannel.com.au/this-day-in-history/ neubronner-applies-for-pigeon-camera-patent/.
- 12 See full statistics on drone warfare from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's website: https://www. thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war
- 13 From YouTube video titled American Drone Bird in Waziristan posted on December 13, 2011 by Abdul Haseeb: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6\_-wy-OeTKU
- 14 See Festo's website: https://www.festo.com/group/en/ cms/10238.htm
- 15 Gregoire Chamayou, Drone Theory (London: Penguin Random House, 2015), 56.
- 16 'Collateral Murder.' Accessed July 5, 2017. https:// collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/.
- 17 Derek Hawkins,  'Brian Williams is 'guided by the beauty of our weapons' in Syria strikes'. Washingtonpost.com , April 7, 2017. Accessed December 15, 2017 - via www. washingtonpost.com.
- 18 'When Kafka Met Orwell: Arrest by Algorithm Mondoweiss.' Accessed July 5, 2017. http://mondoweiss. net/2017/07/orwell-arrest-algorithm/amp/.
- 19 For an extensive discussion of these points, see Heba Y. Amin and Anthony  Downey, 'Contesting Postdigital Futures: Drone Warfare and the Geo-politics of Aerial Surveillance in the Middle East,' Journal of Digital War (2020), 65-73.
- 20  Chamayou, Drone Theory , 27.
- 21 'Knowledge Repository @ IUP.' Site, knowledge.library. iup.edu/as\_patents/13/.
- 22 'Isaiah 31:5.' Isaiah 31:5 As Birds Flying, so Shall the Lord of Hosts Shield above Jerusalem; and He Shall Rescue and Shall Protect and Shall Deliver, studybible. info/compare/Isaiah%2031:5.
- 23 Vivian Gilbert, 'The Romance of the Last Crusade: with Allenby to Jerusalem' Internet Archive, W. B. Feakins, archive.org/details/romanceoflastcru00vivi.
- 24 The Advance of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1919), 3.