{"id":12401,"date":"2014-01-10T01:49:49","date_gmt":"2014-01-10T08:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/?p=12401"},"modified":"2014-01-10T01:55:58","modified_gmt":"2014-01-10T08:55:58","slug":"disturbing-highlights-from-confessions-of-a-drone-warrior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/disturbing-highlights-from-confessions-of-a-drone-warrior\/","title":{"rendered":"Disturbing Highlights from \u2018Confessions of a Drone Warrior\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Rania<\/a>

Rania Khalek<\/p><\/div>\n

by Rania Khalek [written last fall]<\/em><\/p>\n

Journalist Matthew Power wrote a chilling\u00a0piece<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0GQ<\/em>\u00a0profiling Brandon Bryant,\u00a0a former drone operator who flew Predator drones for the US Air Force until his conscience couldn\u2019t take it anymore. I highly recommend reading the entire article because it sheds much needed light on the secretive drone strike process. Nevertheless, I\u2019ve highlighted the parts that stood out to me the most.<\/p>\n

Bryant\u2019s 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\u2014which appear \u201cghostly white against the cool black earth\u201d when they\u2019re alive\u2014on a TV screen,\u00a0is unsettling on so many levels.<\/p>\n

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):<\/p>\n

\u201cThe smoke clears, and there\u2019s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there\u2019s this guy over here, and he\u2019s missing his right leg above his knee. He\u2019s holding it, and he\u2019s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it\u2019s hitting the ground, and it\u2019s 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.\u00a0I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That was in 2007 when Bryant had just turned 21. By 2011, his scorecard, or \u201clist of achievements,\u201d had reached 1,626 \u201cTotal enemies killed in action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryant goes on to detail another strike that he\u2019s certain killed a child. But the higher ups refused to acknowledge it, convincing themselves that it was a dog rather than a little kid.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get this word that we\u2019re gonna fire,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna shoot and collapse the building. They\u2019ve gotten intel that the guy is inside.\u201d The drone crew received no further information, no details of who the target was or why he needed a Hellfire dropped on his roof.<\/p>\n

Bryant\u2019s laser hovered on the corner of the building. \u201cMissile off the rail.\u201d 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. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. \u201cThere\u2019s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there\u2019s no person there.\u201d He looked over at the pilot and asked, \u201cDid that look like a child to you?\u201d They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from \u201csomewhere in the world\u201d\u2014maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea\u2014asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd he says, \u2018Per the review, it\u2019s a dog.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t a dog.<\/p>\n

If they\u2019d had a few more seconds\u2019 warning, they could have aborted the shot, guided it by laser away from the compound. Bryant wouldn\u2019t 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 \u201cwas the type of guy to not argue with command,\u201d says Bryant. So the pilot\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 \u201cthe other\u201d is necessary conditioning in a nation perpetually at war, but for fuck\u2019s sake, what if it was your kid?<\/p>\n

Bryant also spent time flying drones over Iraq from Balad Air Base, often targeting insurgents. As Power notes, \u201cOne 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.\u201d This aspect of drone strikes does not receive nearly enough attention. The fact that the US targets individuals for execution while they\u2019re 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<\/a>\u00a0due to this outrageous mindset.)<\/p>\n

Power goes into great detail about the psychological impact of Bryant\u2019s 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\u2019s guilty conscience. On drone operators with PTSD, Power writes, \u201c[T]o\u00a0mitigate 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.\u00a0Siri, have those people killed.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s just sick!<\/p>\n

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\u2019d had enough and responded (emphasis mine):<\/p>\n

>I\u2019m ashamed to have called any of you assholes brothers in arms.
\n>Combat is combat. Killing is killing. This isn\u2019t a video game. How many of you have killed a group of people, watched as their bodies are picked up,\u00a0watched the funeral, then killed them too?<\/strong>
\n>Yeah, it\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy 2025, drones will be an $82 billion business, employing an additional 100,000 workers,\u201d reports Power.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As much as I appreciated the\u00a0GQ<\/em>\u00a0article, I\u2019d 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\u00a0briefing<\/a>\u00a0held by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). I will be there live-tweeting and will post about it on\u00a0Dispatches from the Underclass<\/em>. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Rania Khalek [written last fall] Journalist Matthew Power wrote a chilling\u00a0piece\u00a0for\u00a0GQ\u00a0profiling Brandon Bryant,\u00a0a former drone operator who flew Predator drones for the US Air Force until his conscience couldn\u2019t take it anymore. I highly recommend reading the entire article … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12401"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12404,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12401\/revisions\/12404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amicuscuria.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}