Report: Former drone operator shares his inner torment
updated 9:25 PM EDT, Wed October 23, 2013
U.S. drone strikes condemned
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- In a magazine interview, Brandon Bryant describes the grisly scenes he witnessed
- His job was to aim the targeting laser for drones from a control station in the U.S.
- He says that over time, he was operating in "zombie mode"
- The interview appears amid renewed attention on the human cost of the drone program
In an interview with the magazine GQ, Bryant recounts some of the grisly scenes he watched unfold on his monitor as an Air Force drone operator.
In grimly vivid detail, he talks about the first time he killed somebody, in early 2007.
He was sitting in a
control station on an Air Force base in Nevada. His three victims were
walking on a dirt road in Afghanistan.
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After the Hellfire missile fired from the drone struck the three men, Bryant watched the aftermath on his infra-red display.
"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 says in
the article in the November issue of GQ.
"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," Bryant says. "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."
Drone program in spotlight
Bryant, 27, has talked
about his experiences before -- to the German magazine Der Spiegel and
to the U.S. broadcaster NBC. But the publication of his interview with
GQ comes amid renewed questions about the human cost -- and the legality
-- of the U.S. drone program.
U.S. officials say the program is a vital tool in the fight against militant groups like al Qaeda.
But two international human rights groups raised serious concerns Tuesday
about the consequences of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen,
suggesting some attacks in recent years may amount to war crimes.
Amnesty International
and Human Rights Watch released reports giving detailed accounts of a
number of attacks they say the United States carried out in each of the
two countries, resulting in the deaths of scores of civilians.
The reports drew from
extensive field research -- including interviews with witnesses and
relatives of victims -- and called for a series of measures to bring the
program in line with international law.
Leaders to meet
The White House on Tuesday disputed the reports' assertions that drone strikes had broken the law.
But the situation was
made all the more awkward by the presence in Washington of Pakistani
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who is due to meet U.S. President Barack
Obama later Wednesday.
Speaking Tuesday at the
U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, Sharif repeated his call for the
United States to end the drone strikes.
"Recently our political
parties in a national conference declared the use of drones is not only a
continued violation of our territorial integrity but also detrimental
to our resolve at efforts in eliminating terrorism from our country," he
said.
'Zombie mode'
Bryant's interview gives a different perspective on the drone program.
The GQ article provides a
detailed study of his time as a drone operative, his decision in 2011
to quit and the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that followed.
Bryant says that during
his time monitoring drones' cameras and aiming its laser targeting
system, he became numb and carried out the job in "zombie mode."
When he left the Air
Force in the spring of 2011 -- after nearly six years -- he says he
turned down a $109,000 bonus to continue operating the drones.
He was given a document
totaling the number of people killed in missions in which he'd
participated in some form during close to 6,000 hours of flight time.
The overall number of 1,626, he says, "made me sick to my stomach."
A 'critical' role
Looking back, he tells GQ, he would feel "horrible" living under a sky in which drones hover, watching, and sometimes killing.
But he says that when he started the job, he believed that the remotely piloted aircraft could help save lives.
The U.S. Defense
Department has repeatedly argued that they prevent the deaths of
American soldiers and protect the nation from terrorism.
Bryant talks of efforts by drone crews to help U.S. troops avoid harm, and of atrocities he saw committed by militants.
He says he watched on
his screen as an insurgent commander pulled two girls out of the trunk
of his vehicle in a crowded marketplace in Iraq.
"They were bound and
gagged," Bryant tells the magazine. "He put them down on their knees,
executed them in the middle of the street, and left them there. People
just watched it and didn't do anything."
A fleeting figure
Regarding fears of
civilian casualties, he describes an occasion in 2007 when he saw a
figure running toward a building in Afghanistan seconds before the
impact of a missile he had aimed at it. The small shape looked to him
like that of a child.
He says he and a colleague asked an intelligence observer on the mission about it.
The response? "Per the review, it's a dog."
Bryant says he was sure it wasn't a dog. In the end, he says, the report of the strike mentioned neither a dog nor a child.
His life after leaving
the program was plagued by drinking and depression. Like many other
drone operators, he was diagnosed with PTSD.
He said he decided to
speak out about his experience -- a decision that has earned him a great
deal of vitriol from some of his former colleagues -- to show that
drone crews' involvement in war is "more than just a video game."
end quote from:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/23/us/drone-operator-interview/?iref=obinsite
Imagine children being trained to be drone operators and told they are playing a video game somewhere on earth. But the people in the video game are real. This could be a future real life "Ender's Game" like the child soldiers in places like Africa or South America or Asia now.
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