Bryant’s “first shot” came later, as he watched a group of insurgents who had been firing on U.S. troops. He was ordered to fire a missile at a second group of armed men standing away from the others.
“The missile hits, and after the smoke clears there’s a crater there and you can see body parts from the people,” Bryant says. “[A] guy that was running from the rear to front, his left leg had been taken off above the knee, and I watched him bleed out.”
Bryant, who was watching on an infrared camera, says he watched the man’s blood rapidly cool to become the same color as the ground. Then, he watched the man he just fired a missile at become the color as the ground he died on.
Though the men he fired on were armed, they weren’t using their weapons at the time, Bryant says.
“These guys had no hostile intent,” he says. “In Montana, everyone has a gun. These guys could have been local people that had to protect themselves. I think we jumped the gun.”
The follow-up report simply stated that there were enemy combatants with confirmed weapons, Bryant says.
Bryant’s second shot is another he won’t soon forget. On a routine mission, he was ordered to fire a missile at a house with three suspected militants inside. Moments before the missile hit, Bryant says he saw something run around the corner of the building.
“It looked like a small person,” he says. “[There] is no doubt in my mind that that was not an adult.”
The missile hit, and afterward there was no sign of the person. It was the end of Bryant’s shift, and as he walked out into the early morning sun in Nevada, he says he didn’t feel distraught like he did after his first shot. He felt numb.
“This was the reality of war,” he says. “Good guys can die, bad guys can die and innocents can die.”
One day in 2010, Bryant was looking at a wall of top al-Qaida leaders and said he asked himself: “Which one of these guys is going to die today?”
“I stopped myself, and I said that’s not me,” he says. “I was taught to respect life, even if in the realities of war we have to take it, it should be done with respect. And I wanted this guy to die.”
Bryant says he tried to talk to a couple of people about it, but people in the drone community don’t talk about the things they’ve done. So, he remained silent, and then he quit.
“I couldn’t do it anymore,” he says.
Bryant is now going to school, and receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. But like other veterans, he’s still waiting for his benefits to kick in.
drones
Now with drone warfare, the same government perceives that violence comes with even less immediate life-and-death risk for our country, and consequently our technologized violence is expanding. Indeed, according to the New York Times, the U.S. government feels so uninhibited that it has moved beyond targeted killing to “drone attacks based on patterns of activity” — attacks aimed at locations without actually “know(ing) the identity of the targets.” Among the general population, it’s much the same dynamic: With drones seeming to make war less risky, there hasn’t just been little opposition to the drone war; polls actually show strong support for continuing the robot onslaught, even as we learn about its deplorable civilian casualties.
A. Why is there such an emerging market for drones?
B. Why does the fact that some people will make lots of money on drones make their domestic mega-debut a done deal and what are the implications of the fact that potential profit for the well-connected is the lodestar of our future?
C. What might Drone World look like 10 or 20 years — or seven generations — down the road? And why does that not seem to be a concern of government; that is to say, why in an alleged democracy is there so little public discussion about the world we’re creating for our children and all succeeding generations?
If you objected to CIA detention and rendition in the Bush era, as I did, know that you’d have to double or triple its victims to equal the number of innocents estimated to have been killed in U.S. drone strikes. Compare known victims of CIA rendition to the total number of non-al-Qaeda killed in drone strikes and the difference is significantly bigger. And don’t forget the noncombatants affected by the presence of drones. Just as in the Bush Administration, the full magnitude of Obama-era transgressions are sinking in slowly, and won’t penetrate the consciousness of most Americans until the end of his second term, if it even happens that rapidly. The Drone War Has More Victims Than the Bush-Era CIA Scandals ☀
Micah Zenko, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank, who closely follows the target killing program, said McClatchy’s findings indicate that the administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.”
The documents also show that drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been “exceedingly rare.”
Could a machine do something that human soldiers throughout the centuries have rarely done, but sometimes do to very important effect — to refuse to follow orders? I’m convinced that, if these weapons are developed, they’re not just going to be deployed by the United States and Sweden, they’re going to be deployed by dictatorships. They’re going to be deployed by countries that primarily see them as a way of controlling domestic unrest and domestic opposition. I imagine a future Bashar Assad with an army of fully autonomous weapons thirty years from now, fifty years from now. We’ve seen in history that one limit on the ability of unscrupulous leaders to do terrible things to their people and to others is that human soldiers, their human enforcers, have certain limits. There are moments when they say no. And those are moments when those regimes fall. Robotic soldiers would never say no. And I’d like us not to go there. Tom Malinowski ☀
Put another way, the drone program in Pakistan succumbed right from the beginning to a temptation critics warned about: killing wasn’t restricted to targets that posed an imminent threat to the United States; rather, the C.I.A. killed people who wouldn’t have even been targets but for the fact that the ruling regime in another country wanted them dead, an act that poses problems moral and strategic. What better way to invite blowback than killing, on behalf of Pakistan’s rulers, people who the United States judged to be no threat to the American homeland? Did the C.I.A. make similar arrangements in other countries? Has this sort of quid pro quo continued into the Obama Administration, with Pakistan putting targets on a kill list in return for continuing to tolerate American drone strikes?* Congress ought to demand answers to those questions. Congress should also assert its authority to ensure that going forward, the C.I.A. is forbidden from killing people who pose no direct threat to America. So long as the executive branch is permitted to do what it will in secret, there will be an incentive for Obama and his successors to kill on behalf of foreign regimes so that they give us permission to kill whoever we want. In a Secret Drone War Immoral Kill Deals Will Always Tempt Us ☀
Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.
That was a lie.
Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.
That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.
What’s the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building? We’re going into a different world, uncharted… you can’t keep the tide from coming in. IT’S NOT A QUESTION OF WHETHER IT’S GOOD OR BAD. I JUST DON’T SEE HOW YOU CAN STOP THEM. Mayor Bloomberg ☀
In USAR, the effective number of robots controlled by a single human operator has a formal term: fan out…Ironically, fielded robots have very low fan out scores today. For instance, the Predator-class drones, unmanned aerial vehicles that fight proxy battles for the United States in distant lands, have a fan out of less than 0.2. That is, more than five people are required at all times, just to manage a single robot. In USAR, researchers have begun to demonstrate ever-increasing fan out — exceeding 6.0 — by providing the robots with more and more autonomy so that the human operator is only responsible for the most strategic decisions, with robots making every tactical choice. Critical to this success is the ability of robots to decide when they need to ask for human help — when they face a survivor, or are stuck in the rubble in a way that the robot cannot extract itself, or when the robot has suffered a serious hardware of software error. This “intelligent reasoning” for deciding when to ask for help means that one human can manage even more robots to achieve a higher fan out…They do not need true autonomy so much as a willingness to call for help whenever required. This alleviates the pressure to create perfect robots, and instead good-enough robots can play meaningful roles in a USAR team because humans will bridge the gap between the robot’s capabilities and what the situation demands.
America, the world’s leading democracy and a country built on a legal and moral framework unlike any other, has adopted a war-making process that too often bypasses its traditional, regimented, and rigorously overseen military in favor of a secret program never publicly discussed, based on legal advice never properly vetted. The Obama administration has used its executive power to refuse or outright ignore requests by congressional overseers, and it has resisted monitoring by federal courts. To implement this covert program, the administration has adopted a tool that lowers the threshold for lethal force by reducing the cost and risk of combat. This still-expanding counterterrorism use of drones to kill people, including its own citizens, outside of traditionally defined battlefields and established protocols for warfare, has given friends and foes a green light to employ these aircraft in extraterritorial operations that could not only affect relations between the nation-states involved but also destabilize entire regions and potentially upset geopolitical order. Another reason to care about drones ☀
The Times told of a Muslim cleric in Yemen named Salem Ahmed bin Ali Jaber, standing in a village mosque denouncing Al Qaeda. It was a brave thing to do — a respected tribal figure, arguing against terrorism. But two days later, when he and a police officer cousin agreed to meet with three Al Qaeda members to continue the argument, all five men — friend and foe — were incinerated by an American drone attack.
The killings infuriated the village and prompted rumors of an upwelling of support in the town for Al Qaeda, because, the Times reported, “such a move is seen as the only way to retaliate against the United States.” Our blind faith in technology combined with a sense of infallible righteousness continues unabated. It brought us to grief in Vietnam and Iraq and may do so again with President Obama’s cold-blooded use of drones and his seeming indifference to so-called “collateral damage,” otherwise known as innocent bystanders. By the standards of slaughter in Vietnam the deaths by drone are hardly a blip on the consciousness of official Washington.
But we have to wonder if each one — a young boy gathering wood at dawn, unsuspecting of his imminent annihilation, the student picking up the wrong hitchhikers, that tribal elder standing up against fanatics — doesn’t give rise to second thoughts by those judges who prematurely handed our president the Nobel Prize for Peace. Better they had kept it on the shelf in hopeful waiting, untarnished.
The United States Government already uses drones on US soil. The United States Government already targets Americans and issues green lights for those on its kill list. The United States Government has already issued defining characteristics of what it considers to be “extremist” and/or domestic terrorism. Do not be ignorant folks, YOU ARE THE ENEMY, this Administration has already said so. And don’t you ever forget it!
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