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Pilots Come Clean: Drone Warfare Is Riddled with Tragic, Bloody Errors
Pratap Chatterjee
Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.
Imagine if those drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen (as well as the United States) had a human face all the time, so that we could understand what it was like to live constantly, in and out of those distant battle zones, with the specter of death. In addition to images of the “al-Qaeda” operatives who the White House wants us to believe are the sole targets of its drone campaigns, we would regularly see photos of innocent victims of drone attacks gathered by human rights groups from their relatives and neighbors. And what about the third group — the military personnel whose lives revolve around killing fields so far away — whose stories, in these years of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns, we’ve just about never heard?
After all, soldiers no longer set sail on ships to journey to distant battlefields for months at a time. Instead, every day, thousands of men and women sign onto their computers at desks on military bases in the continental United States and abroad where they spend hours glued to screens watching the daily lives of people often on the other side of the planet. Occasionally, they get anorder from Washington to push a button and vaporize their subjects. It sounds just like — and the comparison has been made often enough — a video game, which can be switched off at the end of a shift, after which those pilots return home to families and everyday life.
And if you believed what little we normally see of them — what, that is, the Air Force has let us see (the CIA part of the drone program being off-limits to news reporting) — that would indeed seem to be the straightforward story of life for our drone warriors. Take Rene Lopez, who in shots of a recent homecoming welcome at Fort Gordon in Georgia appears to be a doting father.Photographed for the local papers on his return from a tour in Afghanistan, the young soldier is seen holding and kissing his infant daughter dressed in a bright pink top. He smiles with delight as the wide-eyed child tries on his military hat.
From an online profile posted to LinkedIn by Lopez last year, we learn that the clean-cut U.S. Army signals intelligence specialist claims to be an actor in the drone war in addition to being a proud parent. To be specific, he says he has been working in the dark arts of hunting and killing “high value targets” using a National Security Agency (NSA) tool known as Gilgamesh.
That tool is named after a ruthless Sumerian king who ruled over Uruk, an ancient city in what is now Iraq. With the help of the massive trove of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill recently explained that Gilgamesh is the code name for a special device mounted on a Predator drone that can track the mobile phones of individuals without their knowledge by pretending to be a cell phone tower.
Lopez’s resumé yields more details on what Gilgamesh is capable of. The profile writer claims that he “supervised a team of four personnel supporting the lead targeting force in Laghman and Nuristan provinces [in Afghanistan]. Assisted top-level commanders with developing concepts, approaches, and strategies to Capture/Kill HVTs [high value targets].”
Last year, on completing his time in the military, Lopez says he took a civilian job operating Gilgamesh for Mission Essential, an intelligence contractor providing technical support for Pentagon drones. For that company, he says he conducted “pattern of life analysis” and provided support for “targeting and strike operations.” Lopez lives in Grovetown, Georgia, home to a jointArmy-NSA code-breaking and language translation operation, involving 4,000 personnel that, since 9/11, has taken the lead in analyzing real-time data feeds from Central Asia and the Middle East.
Gilgamesh is just one of several NSA tools used on drones to track targeted cell phones. Another program, Shenanigans, was designed specifically for use by the Central Intelligence Agency. According to other documents leaked by Snowden, an operation code-named Victorydance used these tools in March 2012 to map every computer, router, and mobile device in Yemen.
What do men like Lopez actually think about the sort of human destruction, not to speak of the destabilization of whole regions, that Gilgamesh and its like help to unleash? In his online job pitch, Lopez indicates straightforward pride in his work: “My efforts, both as a contractor and in the military, yielded success in identifying, locating, and tracking high value targets, and protection of U.S. and coalition forces.” It would be easy enough to assume that the kind of analytical work such remote pilots do would result in a sense of job satisfaction and little more. And that, it turns out, would be a mistake.
Haunted by Death
In recent months, the first evidence that drones are not only killing thousands in distant lands, but also creating an unexpected kind of blowback among the pilots themselves, provides a curious parallel to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the 5,000-year-old poem about the Sumerian king. In the ancient saga, the gods are said to have sent Enkidu to befriend the cruel king and divert him from the oppression of his subjects. When the pair travel together to slay a monster named Humbaba, Gilgamesh begins to have nightmares about death and war, causing him to question their plan.
Today, like Gilgamesh of old, signals intelligence personnel connected to the drone programs have started reporting themselves haunted by the deaths that they have participated in, and plagued by the knowledge that, in the end, they often had next to no idea who they were actually killing. The publicity about a “kill list” in the White House has left the impression that those who find themselves on the other end of a drone-launched missile have been carefully identified and are known to the drone pilots. “People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” one drone pilot told the Intercept two months ago. His view, however, was quite different: “It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people — we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”
Brandon Bryant, a 28-year-old U.S. airman, whose squadron has been credited with 1,626 kills, was among the first to be openly critical of the impact of remote tracking and targeting, of, that is, robot war. Bryant was a “sensor operator,” which meant that he operated the cameras on the drone aircraft as part of a three-person team that included a pilot and an intelligence analyst.
In an interview with GQ magazine last October, Bryant offered a vivid description of a targeting operation in Afghanistan he took part in when he was just 21. “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,” he said. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.”
Bryant says he asked the pilot: “Did that look like a child to you?” The message came back from another intelligence analyst: “Per the review, it’s a dog.”
After six years, Bryant couldn’t take it any more. He saw a therapist who diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. This was a novel, even shocking development for an airman who had hardly ever come close to a battlefield. Bryant was suitably taken aback and, as a result, began speaking out against the system of killing he had been enmeshed in and what it does both to the killers and those killed. “Combat is combat. Killing is killing. This isn’t a video game,” he wrote in an angry tirade on Facebook. “How many of you have killed a group of people, watched as their bodies are picked up, watched the funeral, then killed them, too?”
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/pilots-come-clean-drone-warfare-riddled-tragic-bloody-errors/
