In a climactic battle in American Sniper (2014), the protagonist Chris Kyle and his platoon are confronting rebel fighters as a gigantic sandstorm approaches. The platoon is aided by formidable surveillance: the stream of aerial images from aircraft providing air support, relayed to soldiers monitoring the battle on overhead screens, and the binoculars and riflescope that Kyle uses to line up and successfully fire at his target, an insurgent on a rooftop 2,100 yards away (we even follow the bullet's path). When the sandstorm engulfs them, suspense is generated about how long Kyle's platoon can hold out: visibility lessens and figures become lost in the landscape, hidden by swirling grains of sand. The insurgent's dead body is glimpsed in a final shot, before the sand erases him altogether.

Erasures in media depictions of the ‘war on terror’ are intensely cinematic. Many people do not even notice them, because the erasures themselves are hidden, like shots produced by visual effects that are meant to be invisible to audiences – here, the VFX sandstorm that transforms a bustling, modern Iraqi city into a desert, devoid of people. It is not accurate to talk simply of erasures, but rather of the heightened visibility of certain people, images and experiences and the reduced visibility of others. Even redactions in official documents, such as interrogation logs for suspected terrorists, are inscribed by this logic: words such as ‘waterboarding’ remain highly visible, along with detainees’ names, while actual details are kept classified. With such ‘public secrets’, ‘things that we all know about, but know we should not know too much about’ (Craze 2015: 389), such as torture under the Bush administration and drone warfare during the Obama era, intense focus on so-called ‘highvalue’ suspects forestalls questions about these measures’ legality and impact on innocent civilians caught up in the whirlwind: the invisible victims.