They sit in rooms resembling hi-tech shipping containers.
Joysticks in hand, they spend hours watching grainy screens, displaying people
in faraway lands going about their daily lives — and they hold life and death
in their hands.
They are the men and women who operate the United States’
controversial drone warfare program — and they frequently get it disastrously
wrong.
A newly-released report by the Associated Press claims that one
third of people killed by US drones in Yemen this year were civilians with no association to
terror groups like Al-Qaeda, the intended targets.
But intention and reality often diverge sharply when it comes to
death by US drones — and the horror is not confined to Yemen. From Pakistan to
Afghanistan, to Iraq, Syria and Somalia, US drone strikes — which are often
hailed by the US military and government as “precise” and even “surgical” —
have killed scores of innocent civilians.
In recent years, multiple whistleblowers — former drone
technicians, camera operators and image analysts — have come forward to shed light on the horror
and reality of what US drone bombing really entails. Perhaps an indicator of
the level of stress involved, the people who do these jobs also quit them
in record numbers. In 2015, an internal Air
Force memo published by the Daily Beast
revealed that there was a serious “outflow” problem
with drone pilots due to the “unrelenting
pace of operations.” Even when the Air Force began to offer
six-figure salaries, it did not stem the outflow from the program.
But
long, arduous shifts and high pressure are just the “official” explanations
for the outflow problem, Laurie Calhoun, the author of ‘We Kill Because We
Can’, an in-depth look at the US’ drone war, told RT.
Apostate
operators and sensors have become disenchanted with the profession and are
plagued by feelings of regret and guilt for having agreed to kill on command
people who never threatened them personally with death.
In the drone age, Calhoun says, while the operators risk no
physical harm, the explanation for their PTSD must derive from “moral factors.”
‘Killing fellow humans on the other side of the planet’
It’s easy to assume that the men and women operating drones are
entirely detached and unfeeling maniacs, but often they are ordinary men and
women who are lured with high salaries and assured by the military that they
will be part of something morally good and justifiable.
Christopher Aaron, a former image analyst, who worked at the
Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Centre in Langley, Virginia and in
Afghanistan as an intelligence liaison, told RT that he began to have second
thoughts about the work during his first deployment in 2006 when he noticed how
the military would celebrate successful kills, but the next day he would
see “more than the intended number
of targets” in funeral processions on the screens in front of
him.
Some of Aaron’s colleagues also began to doubt what they were
doing, but did not know how to express their concerns to senior management, he
said. “We kept it internal. The
military itself did not want to hear dissenting voices, only the intelligence
they required.”
When he finished his second deployment in 2009, Aaron became
extremely ill, physically and emotionally. It took five years for him to regain
his health, through a combination of self-care and being able to speak out
publicly about what he had experienced.
The
cognitive dissonance amongst those who work in an office killing people on the
other side of the planet remotely, and then leave work and go to the grocery
store, the gym, or to their families, can only be suppressed for so long.
While many, like Aaron, experienced mental anguish over the
drone kills, it is certainly true, Calhoun said, that the military at least
tries to select candidates for the job “who
are unlikely to experience compunction upon killing their fellow human beings.”
Potential candidates can sometimes be “vetted” by
testing them on video games and exposing them to “kill TV” in
which they view footage of people being incinerated by drone strikes. Anyone
who balks or raises questions could be removed from consideration for the
program, she said. Even more disturbingly, she explained, people who are
already inclined toward criminal behavior can now command lofty salaries for
killing people without any risk of death or incarceration for doing so.
‘Everyone drank’
In ‘National Bird’, a 2016 documentary about the devastating
impacts of US drone wars, investigative journalist Sonia Kennebeck spoke to
three other whistleblowers who have been trying to expose the dark realities of
the drone program.
One man, identified only as Daniel, was a homeless teen whose
male family members were in prison for petty crimes. Another, Heather Linebaugh,
was a high-school graduate looking for a way out of rural Pennsylvania — not
the kind of callous psychopaths you might imagine are drawn to a job that
involves treating human beings, who often cannot be accurately identified, like
video-game targets.
“I was under the impression that America was saving the world,
like, that we were Big Brother and we were helping everyone out,” Linebaugh
told Kennebeck.
But reality eventually hit.
“It’s so primitive, raw, stripped-down death. This is real. It’s
not a joke,” she said.
You
see someone die because you said it was okay to kill them. I was always
shaking. Sometimes I would just go to the bathroom and just sit on the toilet.
I mean just sit there in my uniform and just cry.
For Linebaugh, after three years on the job, the psychological
trauma proved too much and she was diagnosed as suicidal. Two of her colleagues
committed suicide and many others relied heavily on alcohol.
Another
former imagery analyst, Michael Haas, told Rolling Stone, that he and his
colleagues would call alcohol “drone
fuel” because it essentially “kept the program going.”
“Everyone drank. There was a lot of coke, speed, and that sort of
thing,” Haas said. “If
the higher ups knew, then they didn’t say anything, but I’m pretty sure they
must have known. It was everywhere.”
Could it be the case that the higher ups turn a blind eye to
this substance abuse because it produces the necessary results? Whistleblower
Brandon Bryant told Rolling Stone that when he first
arrived at the Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas, Metallica heavy metal
music was played to get new recruits prepared for the job. “Gentlemen! Welcome to
Creech,” an officer announced. “While here, it will be your
job to blow shit up and kill people!”
‘Attempt to silence whistleblowers’
There is a common misconception that the use of drones minimizes
civilian casualties, but the facts and figures do not back up that claim. In a
shocking 2014 figure on Pakistan, US drones killed an estimated 1,147 people while
attempting to take out 41 men with links to terror groups.
Targets are chosen based on intelligence which comes from
informants, but strikes can also be carried out based on observations of
suspicious patterns of behavior in potential targets. Operators technically
have “no way of knowing whether the
analysis on which an order to kill rests is sound,” Calhoun
said, who explained that while the execution of an unarmed and unthreatening
person is considered a war crime when committed by a soldier on the ground, it
is deemed acceptable if done from the air. “Those who ponder this question are likely to abandon the
profession,” she said.
And those who go further and blow the whistle have already faced
government intimidation. The man identified as Daniel in Kennebeck’s
documentary estimated that as many as 50 FBI agents were involved in a raid on his
home, during which documents and electronics were seized. “To me, that’s simply an
attempt to silence whistleblowers,” his lawyer, Jesselyn
Radack said.
In 2015, hours after Bryant testified before the German
parliament about the “essential” role
played in the US’ drone war by the Ramstein air base, the whistleblower’s
mother was confronted at her home in Montana by two
air force officers who told her she was on Islamic State’s (IS, formerly
ISIS) “hit list” —
another clear case of intimidation according to Radack, who also represents
Bryant.
But for people like Aaron, moral questions prevail, because it
seems like the killings only lead to more violence and radicalization on the
ground. For Islamist militants and radical preachers, the US drone war has
become a rallying cry for more recruits in their insurgency, and each of the
innocent casualties only adds to their numbers.
How
many more ‘terrorists’ have we now created, from those impressionable boys who
see the prophecy of their teacher come true?
Reprinted from RT News.