By Debra Sweet

This is a call for everyone who can possibly make it to The Whitney museum in NYC to view Astro Noise, the installation by Laura Poitras. She made the film Citizenfour, responsible for connecting Edward Snowden to international news media.  But well before that, she was an artist exploring the U.S. global "war on terror" in film, and in life. I liked the exhibition very much for its internationalism, and artisttry.  I plan to go back, and will share more with you.

A part of the installation is Bed Down Location: Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, United States.

Brooklyn Rail Chloe Wyma writes that in "Bed Down Location, viewers recline on a cushioned platform, gazing overhead at a video of velvety, star-filled skies over Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. The installation, Poitras explains in the exhibition catalog, is designed to evoke the constant fear of living under drone surveillance. “By asking people to lie down in Bed Down Location,” she says, “I want them to enter an empathic space […] and imagine that there’s a machine flying above you that can end of your life at any moment.” The overall effect, however, is less frightening than ambient. In a twist ending that almost lands, a surveillance monitor at the terminus of the exhibition reveals that an infrared camera concealed in the ceiling has been secretly recording the installation, turning museumgoers into literal objects of surveillance."

Last Week, Largest Death Toll in U.S. Drone Strike

In an interview in The Atlantic, Barack Obama says he “'has not had a second thought' about the drone strikes that are causing untold numbers of civilian casualties as the US tries to beat back terrorist insurgencies in the Middle East, according to a new interview with the president and top aides."

On March 9, reports Glenn Greenwald, "The U.S. used drones and manned aircraft yesterday to drop bombs and missiles on Somalia, ending the lives of at least 150 people. As it virtually always does, the Obama administration instantly claimed that the people killed were “terrorists” and militants — members of the Somali group al Shabaab — but provided no evidence to support that assertion...Other than the higher-than-normal death toll, this mass killing is an incredibly common event under the presidency of the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate, who has so far bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries."