Rania Khalek
by Rania Khalek [written last fall]
Journalist Matthew Power wrote a chilling piece for GQ profiling Brandon Bryant, a former drone operator who flew Predator drones for the US Air Force until his conscience couldn’t take it anymore. I highly recommend reading the entire article because it sheds much needed light on the secretive drone strike process. Nevertheless, I’ve highlighted the parts that stood out to me the most.
Bryant’s description of his first kill caused knots in my stomach. The video game-like disconnect that reduces the murder of human beings to the disappearance of their infrared heat signatures—which appear “ghostly white against the cool black earth” when they’re alive—on a TV screen, is unsettling on so many levels.
After firing his first hellfire missile at complete strangers from the safety of a Las Vegas, Nevada, Air Force base, Bryant watched a disturbing scene unfold (emphasis mine):
“The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”
That was in 2007 when Bryant had just turned 21. By 2011, his scorecard, or “list of achievements,” had reached 1,626 “Total enemies killed in action.”
Bryant goes on to detail another strike that he’s certain killed a child. But the higher ups refused to acknowledge it, convincing themselves that it was a dog rather than a little kid.
“We get this word that we’re gonna fire,” he says. “We’re gonna shoot and collapse the building. They’ve gotten intel that the guy is inside.” The drone crew received no further information, no details of who the target was or why he needed a Hellfire dropped on his roof.
Bryant’s laser hovered on the corner of the building. “Missile off the rail.” Nothing moved inside the compound but the eerily glowing cows and goats. Bryant zoned out at the pixels. Then, about six seconds before impact, he saw a hurried movement in the compound. “This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person.”
Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot.
“And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ ”
Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog.
If they’d had a few more seconds’ warning, they could have aborted the shot, guided it by laser away from the compound. Bryant wouldn’t have cared about wasting a $95,000 Hellfire to avoid what he believed had happened. But as far as the official military version of events was concerned, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The pilot “was the type of guy to not argue with command,” says Bryant. So the pilot’s after-action report stated that the building had been destroyed, the high-value target eliminated. The report made no mention of a dog or any other living thing. The child, if there had been a child, was an infrared ghost.”
Just imagine how often a scenario like this plays out, how often innocent people, children, are killed by US drone strikes, people who the world will never know even existed. I suppose such callous disregard for the lives of “the other” is necessary conditioning in a nation perpetually at war, but for fuck’s sake, what if it was your kid?
Bryant also spent time flying drones over Iraq from Balad Air Base, often targeting insurgents. As Power notes, “One of the issues with targeting insurgents was that they often traveled with their families, and there was no way to tell who exactly was in any given building.” This aspect of drone strikes does not receive nearly enough attention. The fact that the US targets individuals for execution while they’re driving in their cars or sleeping at home, likely with their families, is criminal and justifying it is tantamount to arguing that civilians are fair game based on their proximity to suspected militants. (Children have been killed due to this outrageous mindset.)
Power goes into great detail about the psychological impact of Bryant’s job. He suffers from severe PTSD just like a combat soldier, which is tragic. But not to worry, there are twisted sociopaths out there with a potential fix for the drone operator’s guilty conscience. On drone operators with PTSD, Power writes, “[T]o mitigate these effects, researchers have proposed creating a Siri-like user interface, a virtual copilot that anthropomorphizes the drone and lets crews shunt off the blame for whatever happens. Siri, have those people killed.”
That’s just sick!
When Bryant first went to the media with information about his time as a drone operator, the backlash from the military community was overwhelming. He spent hours reading mean comments about him on social media and scouring the comments sections of articles. Eventually, he’d had enough and responded (emphasis mine):
>I’m ashamed to have called any of you assholes brothers in arms.
>Combat is combat. Killing is killing. This isn’t a video game. How many of you have killed a group of people, watched as their bodies are picked up, watched the funeral, then killed them too?
>Yeah, it’s not the same as being on the ground. So fucking what? Until you know what it is like and can make an intelligent meaningful assessment, shut your goddamn fucking mouths before somebody shuts them for you.
So there you have it, directly from a drone operator. The US bombs funerals. Even more disturbing is the industry profiting off of drone warfare.
“By 2025, drones will be an $82 billion business, employing an additional 100,000 workers,” reports Power.
Drones have the potential for good. They could be adapted to help monitor wildfires and assist in search in rescue operations. Instead, their primary purpose has been to spy and kill.
As much as I appreciated the GQ article, I’d like to know more about drone strike victims, both the dead and those who have survived. This Tuesday, October 29, a Pakistani family of drone strike survivors will be addressing congress at a briefing held by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). I will be there live-tweeting and will post about it on Dispatches from the Underclass. Stay tuned.
