Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, Inside the Devastation of America's Drone Wars
By Pratap Chatterjee
Posted on April 21, 2016, Printed on April 21, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176131/ ;
In our part of the world, it's not often that potential "collateral damage"
speaks, but it happened last week. A Pakistani tribal leader, Malik Jalal,
flew to England to plead in a newspaper piece he wrote and in media
interviews to be taken off the Obama White House's "kill list." ("I am in
England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me
without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to
speak to them instead.") Jalal, who lives in Pakistan's tribal borderlands,
is a local leader and part of a peace committee sanctioned by the Pakistani
government that is trying to tamp down the violence in the region. He
believes that he's been targeted for assassination by Washington. (Four
drone missiles, he claims, have just missed him or his car.) His family, he
says, is traumatized by the drones. "I don't want to end up a 'Bugsplat' --
the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being
blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone," he writes.
"More importantly, I don't want my family to become victims, or even to live
with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be
vaporized."
Normally, what "they" do to us, or our European counterparts (think:
Brussels, Paris, or San Bernardino), preoccupies us 24/7. What we do to
"them" -- and them turns out to be far more than groups of terrorists --
seldom touches our world at all. As TomDispatch readers know, this website
has paid careful attention to the almost 300 wedding celebrants killed by
U.S. air power between late 2001 and the end of 2013 -- eight wedding
parties eviscerated in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen).
These are deaths that, unlike the 14 Americans murdered in San Bernardino,
the 32 Belgians and others killed in Brussels, and the 130 French and others
slaughtered in Paris, have caused not even a ripple here (though imagine for
a second the reaction if even a single wedding, no less eight of them and
hundreds of revelers, had been wiped out by a terror attack in the U.S. in
these years).
Any sense of sadness or regret for Washington's actions, when it comes to
the many killed, wounded, or traumatized in its never-ending, implacable,
and remarkably unsuccessful war on terror, is notable mainly for its absence
from our world. So it's an extraordinary moment when any Americans -- no
less a group that has been deeply involved in prosecuting the drone war on
terror -- publicly expresses empathy for the "collateral damage" inflicted
in that ongoing conflict. That's why TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee
brings genuine news today from the heart of America's drone wars, from those
who should best be able to assess the grim reality of just what Washington
has been doing in our name. Tom
Drone Whistleblowers Step Out of the Shadows
In Washington's Drone Wars, Collateral Damage Comes Home
By Pratap Chatterjee
In a trio of recent action-packed movies, good guys watch terrorists
mingling with innocent women and children via real-time video feeds from
halfway across the world. A clock ticks and we, the audience, are let in on
the secret that mayhem is going to break loose. After much agonized
soul-searching about possible collateral damage, the good guys call in a
missile strike from a U.S. drone to try to save the day by taking out a set
of terrorists.
Such is the premise of Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky, Andrew Niccol's Good
Kill, and Rick Rosenthal's Drones. In reality, in Washington's drone wars
neither the "good guys" nor the helpless, endangered villagers under those
robotic aircraft actually survive the not-so secret drone war that the Obama
administration has been waging relentlessly across the Greater Middle East
-- not, at least, without some kind of collateral damage. In addition to
those they kill, Washington's drones turn out to wound (in ways both
physical and psychological) their own operators and the populations who live
under their constant surveillance. They leave behind very real victims with
all-too-real damage, often in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder on
opposite sides of the globe.
"Sometimes I am so sad that my heart wants to explode," an Afghan man says,
speaking directly into the camera. "When your body is intact, your mind is
different. You are content. But the moment you are wounded, your soul gets
damaged. When your leg is torn off and your gait slows, it also burdens your
spirit." The speaker is an unnamed victim of a February 2010 drone strike in
Uruzgan, Afghanistan, but he could just as easily be an Iraqi, a Pakistani,
a Somali, or a Yemeni. He appears in National Bird, a haunting new
documentary film by Sonia Kennebeck about the unexpected and largely
unrecorded devastation Washington's drone wars leave in their wake. In it,
the audience hears directly from both drone personnel and their victims.
"I Was Under the Impression That America Was Saving the World"
"When we are in our darkest places and we have a lot to worry about and we
feel guilty about our past actions, it's really tough to describe what that
feeling is like," says Daniel, a whistleblower who took part in drone
operations and whose last name is not revealed in National Bird. Speaking of
the suicidal feelings that sometimes plagued him while he was involved in
killing halfway across the planet, he adds, "Having the image in your head
of taking your own life is not a good feeling."
National Bird is not the first muckraking documentary on Washington's drone
wars. Robert Greenwald's Unmanned, Tonje Schei's Drone, and Madiha Tahrir's
Wounds of Waziristan have already shone much-needed light on how drone
warfare really works. But as Kennebeck told me, when she set out to make a
film about the wages of the newest form of war known to humanity, she wanted
those doing the targeting, as well as those they were targeting, to speak
for themselves. She wanted them to reveal the psychological impact of
sending robot assassins, often operated by "pilots" halfway around the
world, into the Greater Middle East to fight Washington's war on terror. In
her film, there's no narrator, nor experts in suits working for think tanks
in Washington, nor retired generals debating the value of drone strikes when
it comes to defeating terrorism.
Instead, what you see is far less commonplace: low-level recruits in
President Obama's never-ending drone wars, those Air Force personnel who
remotely direct the robotic vehicles to their targets, analyze the
information they send back, and relay that information to the pilots who
unleash Hellfire missiles that will devastate distant villages. If recent
history is any guide, these drones do not just kill terrorists; in their
target areas, they also create anxiety, upset, and a desire for revenge in a
larger population and so have proven a powerful weapon in spreading terror
movements across the Greater Middle East.
These previously faceless but distinctly non-robotic Air Force recruits are
the cannon fodder of America's drone wars. You meet two twenty-somethings:
Daniel, a self-described down-and-out homeless kid, every male member of
whose family has been in jail on petty charges of one kind or another, and
Heather, a small town high school graduate trying to escape rural
Pennsylvania. You also meet Lisa, a former Army nurse from California, who
initially saw the military as a path to a more meaningful life.
The three of them worked on Air Force bases scattered around the country
from California to Virginia. The equipment they handled hovered above war
zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Pakistan and Yemen (where the U.S.
Air Force was supporting assassination missions on behalf of the Central
Intelligence Agency).
"That is so cool, unmanned aircraft. That's really bad-ass." So Heather
thought when she first saw recruitment posters for the drone program. "I was
under the impression," she told Kennebeck, "that America was saving the
world, like that we were Big Brother and we were helping everyone out."
Initially, Lisa felt similarly: "When I first got into the military, I mean
I was thinking it was a win-win. It was a force for good in the world. I
thought I was going to be on the right side of history."
And that was hardly surprising. After all, you're talking about the
"perfect weapon," the totally high-tech, "precise" and "surgical,"
no-(American)-casualties, sci-fi version of war that Washington has been
promoting for years as its answer to al-Qaeda and other terror outfits.
President Obama who has personally overseen the drone campaigns -- with a
"kill list" and "terror Tuesday" meetings at the White House -- vividly
described his version of such a modern war in a 2013 speech at the National
Defense University:
"This is a just war -- a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in
self-defense. We were attacked on 9/11. Under domestic law, and
international law, the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, the Taliban,
and their associated forces. America does not take strikes to punish
individuals; we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent
threat to the American people. And before any strike is taken, there must be
near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured -- the highest
standard we can set."
That distinctly Hollywood vision of America's drone wars (with a Terminator
edge) was the one that had filtered down to the level of Kennebeck's three
drone-team interviewees when they signed on. It looked to them then like a
war worth fighting and a life worth leading. Today, as they speak out,
their version of such warfare looks nothing like what either Hollywood or
Washington might imagine.
"Excuse Me, Sir, Can I Have Your Driver's License?"
National Bird does more than look at the devastation caused by drones in far
away lands and the overwhelming anxiety it produces among those who live
under the distant buzzing and constant threat of those robotic aircraft on
an almost daily basis. Kennebeck also turns her camera on the men and women
who helped make the strikes possible, trying to assess what the impact of
their war has been on them. Their raw and unfiltered responses should deeply
trouble us all.
Kennebeck's interviewees are among at least a dozen whistleblowers who have
stepped forward, or are preparing to do so, in order to denounce
Washington's drone wars as morally unjustified, as in fact nightmares both
for those who fight them and those living in the lands that are on the
receiving end. The realities of the day-in, day-out war they fought for
years were, as they tell it, deeply destructive and filled with collateral
damage of every sort. Worse yet, drone operators turn out to have little
real idea about, and almost no confirmation of, whom exactly they've blown
away.
"It's so primitive, raw, stripped-down death. This is real. It's not a
joke," says Heather, an imagery analyst whose job was to look at the
streaming video coming in from drones over war zones and interpret the
grainy images for senior commanders in the kill chain. "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."
Advocates of drone war believe, as do many of its critics, that it minimizes
casualties. These Air Force veterans have, however, stepped forward to tell
us that such claims simply aren't true. In a study of what can be known
about drone killings, the human rights group Reprieve has confirmed this
reality vividly, finding that, in Pakistan, in attempts to take out 41 men,
American drones actually killed an estimated 1,147 people (while not all of
the 41 targeted figures even died). In other words, this hasn't proved to be
a war on terror, but a war of terror, a reality the drone whistleblowers
confirm.
Heather is blunt in her criticism. "Hearing politicians speak about drones
being precision weapons [makes it seem like they're] able to make surgical
strikes. To me it's completely ridiculous, completely ludicrous to make
these statements."
The three whistleblowers point, for instance, to the complete absence of any
post-strike verification of who exactly has died. "There's a bomb. They drop
it. It explodes," Lisa says. "Then what? Does somebody go down and ask for
somebody's driver's license? Excuse me, sir, can I have your driver's
license, see who you are? Does that happen? I mean, how do we know? How is
it possible to know who ends up living or dying?"
After three years as an imagery analyst, after regularly watching unknown
people die thousands of miles away on a grainy screen, Heather was diagnosed
as suicidal. She estimates -- and the experiences of other drone
whistleblowers back her up -- that alcoholics accounted for a significant
percentage of her unit, and that many of her co-workers had similarly
suicidal thoughts. Two actually did kill themselves.
As Heather's grandfather points out, "She had trouble getting the treatment
she needed. She had trouble finding a doctor because they didn't have the
right security clearance [and] she could be in violation of the law and
could even go to prison for even talking to the wrong therapist about what
was bothering her."
In desperation Heather turned to her mother. "She'd call me up and she'd cry
and she'd be upset, but then she couldn't talk about it," her mother says.
"When you hear your daughter talking to you on the phone, you can that tell
she is in trouble just by the emotion and inflection and the stress that you
can hear in her voice. When you ask her, did you talk to anyone else about
it? She'd say no, we're not allowed to talk to anybody. I have a feeling
that if someone wasn't there for her, she wouldn't be here right now."
Like Heather, Daniel has so far survived his own drone-war-induced mental
health issues, but in his post-drone life he's run into a formidable enemy:
the U.S. government. On August 8, 2014, he estimates that as many as 50
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided his house, seizing documents
and his electronics.
"The government suspects that he is a source of information about the
[drone] program that the government doesn't want out there," says Jesselyn
Radack, his lawyer and herself a former Department of Justice whistleblower.
"To me, that's simply an attempt to silence whistleblowers, and it doesn't
surprise me that that happens to the very few people who have been brave
enough to speak out against the drone program."
If that was the intention, however, the raid -- and the threat it carries
for other whistleblowers -- seems not to have had the desired effect.
Instead, the number of what might be thought of as defectors from the drone
program only seems to be growing. The first to come out was Brandon Bryant,
a former camera operator in October 2013. He was followed by Cian
Westmoreland, a former radio technician, in November 2014. Last November,
Michael Haas and Stephen Lewis, two imagery analysts, joined Westmoreland
and Bryant by speaking out at the launch of Tonje Schei's film Drone. All
four of them also published an open letter to President Obama warning him
that the drone war was escalating terrorism, not containing it.
And just last month, Chris Aaron, a former counterterrorism analyst for the
CIA's drone program, spoke out on a panel at the University of Nevada Law
School. In the relatively near future, Radack recently told Rolling Stone,
four more individuals involved in America's drone wars are planning to offer
their insights into how the program works.
Like Heather and Daniel, many of the former drone operators who have gone
public are struggling with mental health problems. Some of them are also
dealing with substance abuse issues that began as a way to counteract or
dull the horrors of the war they were wagomg and witnessing. "We used to
call alcohol drone fuel because it kept the program going. Everyone drank.
There was a lot of coke, speed, and that sort of thing," imagery analyst
Haas told Rolling Stone. "If the higher ups knew, then they didn't say
anything, but I'm pretty sure they must have known. It was everywhere."
"Imagine If This Was Happening to Us"
In recent months, something has changed for the whistleblowers. There is a
new sense of camaraderie among them, as well as with the lawyers defending
them and a growing group of activist supporters. Most unexpectedly, they are
hearing from the families of victims of drone strikes, thanks to the work of
groups like Reprieve in Great Britain.
In mid-April, for instance, Cian Westmoreland traveled to London and met
Malik Jalal, a Pakistani tribal leader who claims that he has been targeted
by U.S. drones on multiple occasions. Clive Lewis, a member of Parliament
and military veteran, released a photo on Facebook of the historic meeting.
"It's possible that one of the two men I'm [standing] between in this
picture, Cian Westmoreland, was trying to kill the man on my right, Malik
Jalal -- at some stage in the past seven years," Lewis wrote. "Their story
is both amazing and terrifying. At once it shows the growing menace and
destructive capability of unchecked political and military power juxtaposed
with the power of the human spirit and human solidarity."
As that sense of solidarity strengthens and as the distance between the
former hunters and the hunted begins to narrow, the whistleblowers are
beginning to confront some distinctly uncomfortable questions. "We often
hear that drones can see everything by day and by night," a different drone
victim of the February 2010 strike in Uruzgan told filmmaker Kennebeck. "You
can see the difference between a needle and an ant but not people? We were
sitting in the pickup truck, some even on the bed. Did you not see that
there were travelers, women and children?"
When the president and his key officials look at the drone program, they
undoubtedly don't "see" women and children. Instead, they are caught up in a
Hollywood-style vision of imminent danger from terrorists and of the kind of
salvation that a missile launched from thousands of miles away provides. It
is undoubtedly thanks to just this thought process, already deeply embedded
in the American way of war, that not a single candidate for president in
2016 has rejected the drone program.
That is exactly what the whistleblowers feel needs to change. "I just want
people to know that not everybody is a freaking terrorist and we need to
just get out of that mindset. And we just need to see these people as people
-- families, communities, brothers, mothers, and sisters, because that's who
they are," says Lisa. "Imagine if this was happening to us. Imagine if our
children were walking outside of the door and it was a sunny day and they
were afraid because they didn't know if today was the day that something
would fall out of the sky and kill someone close to them. How would we
feel?"
Pratap Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, is executive director of
CorpWatch. He is the author of Halliburton's Army: How A Well-Connected
Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. His next book,
Verax, a graphic novel about whistleblowers and mass surveillance
co-authored with Khalil Bendib, will be published by Metropolitan Books in
2017.
[Note: Sonia Kennebeck's National Bird premieres this month at New York's
Tribeca Film Festival and at the San Francisco Film Festival. It will open
in theaters this fall.]
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright Pratap Chatterjee 2016
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176131
Tomgram: Pratap Chatterjee, Inside the Devastation of America's Drone Wars
By Pratap Chatterjee
Posted on April 21, 2016, Printed on April 21, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176131/ ;
In our part of the world, it's not often that potential "collateral damage"
speaks, but it happened last week. A Pakistani tribal leader, Malik Jalal,
flew to England to plead in a newspaper piece he wrote and in media
interviews to be taken off the Obama White House's "kill list." ("I am in
England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me
without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to
speak to them instead.") Jalal, who lives in Pakistan's tribal borderlands,
is a local leader and part of a peace committee sanctioned by the Pakistani
government that is trying to tamp down the violence in the region. He
believes that he's been targeted for assassination by Washington. (Four
drone missiles, he claims, have just missed him or his car.) His family, he
says, is traumatized by the drones. "I don't want to end up a 'Bugsplat' --
the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being
blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone," he writes.
"More importantly, I don't want my family to become victims, or even to live
with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be
vaporized."
Normally, what "they" do to us, or our European counterparts (think:
Brussels, Paris, or San Bernardino), preoccupies us 24/7. What we do to
"them" -- and them turns out to be far more than groups of terrorists --
seldom touches our world at all. As TomDispatch readers know, this website
has paid careful attention to the almost 300 wedding celebrants killed by
U.S. air power between late 2001 and the end of 2013 -- eight wedding
parties eviscerated in three countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen). These
are deaths that, unlike the 14 Americans murdered in San Bernardino, the 32
Belgians and others killed in Brussels, and the 130 French and others
slaughtered in Paris, have caused not even a ripple here (though imagine for
a second the reaction if even a single wedding, no less eight of them and
hundreds of revelers, had been wiped out by a terror attack in the U.S. in
these years).
Any sense of sadness or regret for Washington's actions, when it comes to
the many killed, wounded, or traumatized in its never-ending, implacable,
and remarkably unsuccessful war on terror, is notable mainly for its absence
from our world. So it's an extraordinary moment when any Americans -- no
less a group that has been deeply involved in prosecuting the drone war on
terror -- publicly expresses empathy for the "collateral damage" inflicted
in that ongoing conflict. That's why TomDispatch regular Pratap Chatterjee
brings genuine news today from the heart of America's drone wars, from those
who should best be able to assess the grim reality of just what Washington
has been doing in our name. Tom
Drone Whistleblowers Step Out of the Shadows
In Washington's Drone Wars, Collateral Damage Comes Home
By Pratap Chatterjee
In a trio of recent action-packed movies, good guys watch terrorists
mingling with innocent women and children via real-time video feeds from
halfway across the world. A clock ticks and we, the audience, are let in on
the secret that mayhem is going to break loose. After much agonized
soul-searching about possible collateral damage, the good guys call in a
missile strike from a U.S. drone to try to save the day by taking out a set
of terrorists.
Such is the premise of Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky, Andrew Niccol's Good
Kill, and Rick Rosenthal's Drones. In reality, in Washington's drone wars
neither the "good guys" nor the helpless, endangered villagers under those
robotic aircraft actually survive the not-so secret drone war that the Obama
administration has been waging relentlessly across the Greater Middle East
-- not, at least, without some kind of collateral damage. In addition to
those they kill, Washington's drones turn out to wound (in ways both
physical and psychological) their own operators and the populations who live
under their constant surveillance. They leave behind very real victims with
all-too-real damage, often in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder on
opposite sides of the globe.
"Sometimes I am so sad that my heart wants to explode," an Afghan man says,
speaking directly into the camera. "When your body is intact, your mind is
different. You are content. But the moment you are wounded, your soul gets
damaged. When your leg is torn off and your gait slows, it also burdens your
spirit." The speaker is an unnamed victim of a February 2010 drone strike in
Uruzgan, Afghanistan, but he could just as easily be an Iraqi, a Pakistani,
a Somali, or a Yemeni. He appears in National Bird, a haunting new
documentary film by Sonia Kennebeck about the unexpected and largely
unrecorded devastation Washington's drone wars leave in their wake. In it,
the audience hears directly from both drone personnel and their victims.
"I Was Under the Impression That America Was Saving the World"
"When we are in our darkest places and we have a lot to worry about and we
feel guilty about our past actions, it's really tough to describe what that
feeling is like," says Daniel, a whistleblower who took part in drone
operations and whose last name is not revealed in National Bird. Speaking of
the suicidal feelings that sometimes plagued him while he was involved in
killing halfway across the planet, he adds, "Having the image in your head
of taking your own life is not a good feeling."
National Bird is not the first muckraking documentary on Washington's drone
wars. Robert Greenwald's Unmanned, Tonje Schei's Drone, and Madiha Tahrir's
Wounds of Waziristan have already shone much-needed light on how drone
warfare really works. But as Kennebeck told me, when she set out to make a
film about the wages of the newest form of war known to humanity, she wanted
those doing the targeting, as well as those they were targeting, to speak
for themselves. She wanted them to reveal the psychological impact of
sending robot assassins, often operated by "pilots" halfway around the
world, into the Greater Middle East to fight Washington's war on terror. In
her film, there's no narrator, nor experts in suits working for think tanks
in Washington, nor retired generals debating the value of drone strikes when
it comes to defeating terrorism.
Instead, what you see is far less commonplace: low-level recruits in
President Obama's never-ending drone wars, those Air Force personnel who
remotely direct the robotic vehicles to their targets, analyze the
information they send back, and relay that information to the pilots who
unleash Hellfire missiles that will devastate distant villages. If recent
history is any guide, these drones do not just kill terrorists; in their
target areas, they also create anxiety, upset, and a desire for revenge in a
larger population and so have proven a powerful weapon in spreading terror
movements across the Greater Middle East.
These previously faceless but distinctly non-robotic Air Force recruits are
the cannon fodder of America's drone wars. You meet two twenty-somethings:
Daniel, a self-described down-and-out homeless kid, every male member of
whose family has been in jail on petty charges of one kind or another, and
Heather, a small town high school graduate trying to escape rural
Pennsylvania. You also meet Lisa, a former Army nurse from California, who
initially saw the military as a path to a more meaningful life.
The three of them worked on Air Force bases scattered around the country
from California to Virginia. The equipment they handled hovered above war
zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Pakistan and Yemen (where the U.S.
Air Force was supporting assassination missions on behalf of the Central
Intelligence Agency).
"That is so cool, unmanned aircraft. That's really bad-ass." So Heather
thought when she first saw recruitment posters for the drone program. "I was
under the impression," she told Kennebeck, "that America was saving the
world, like that we were Big Brother and we were helping everyone out."
Initially, Lisa felt similarly: "When I first got into the military, I mean
I was thinking it was a win-win. It was a force for good in the world. I
thought I was going to be on the right side of history."
And that was hardly surprising. After all, you're talking about the "perfect
weapon," the totally high-tech, "precise" and "surgical,"
no-(American)-casualties, sci-fi version of war that Washington has been
promoting for years as its answer to al-Qaeda and other terror outfits.
President Obama who has personally overseen the drone campaigns -- with a
"kill list" and "terror Tuesday" meetings at the White House -- vividly
described his version of such a modern war in a 2013 speech at the National
Defense University:
"This is a just war -- a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in
self-defense. We were attacked on 9/11. Under domestic law, and
international law, the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, the Taliban,
and their associated forces. America does not take strikes to punish
individuals; we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent
threat to the American people. And before any strike is taken, there must be
near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured -- the highest
standard we can set."
That distinctly Hollywood vision of America's drone wars (with a Terminator
edge) was the one that had filtered down to the level of Kennebeck's three
drone-team interviewees when they signed on. It looked to them then like a
war worth fighting and a life worth leading. Today, as they speak out, their
version of such warfare looks nothing like what either Hollywood or
Washington might imagine.
"Excuse Me, Sir, Can I Have Your Driver's License?"
National Bird does more than look at the devastation caused by drones in far
away lands and the overwhelming anxiety it produces among those who live
under the distant buzzing and constant threat of those robotic aircraft on
an almost daily basis. Kennebeck also turns her camera on the men and women
who helped make the strikes possible, trying to assess what the impact of
their war has been on them. Their raw and unfiltered responses should deeply
trouble us all.
Kennebeck's interviewees are among at least a dozen whistleblowers who have
stepped forward, or are preparing to do so, in order to denounce
Washington's drone wars as morally unjustified, as in fact nightmares both
for those who fight them and those living in the lands that are on the
receiving end. The realities of the day-in, day-out war they fought for
years were, as they tell it, deeply destructive and filled with collateral
damage of every sort. Worse yet, drone operators turn out to have little
real idea about, and almost no confirmation of, whom exactly they've blown
away.
"It's so primitive, raw, stripped-down death. This is real. It's not a
joke," says Heather, an imagery analyst whose job was to look at the
streaming video coming in from drones over war zones and interpret the
grainy images for senior commanders in the kill chain. "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."
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463710/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Advocates
of drone war believe, as do many of its critics, that it minimizes
casualties. These Air Force veterans have, however, stepped forward to tell
us that such claims simply aren't true. In a study of what can be known
about drone killings, the human rights group Reprieve has confirmed this
reality vividly, finding that, in Pakistan, in attempts to take out 41 men,
American drones actually killed an estimated 1,147 people (while not all of
the 41 targeted figures even died). In other words, this hasn't proved to be
a war on terror, but a war of terror, a reality the drone whistleblowers
confirm.
Heather is blunt in her criticism. "Hearing politicians speak about drones
being precision weapons [makes it seem like they're] able to make surgical
strikes. To me it's completely ridiculous, completely ludicrous to make
these statements."
The three whistleblowers point, for instance, to the complete absence of any
post-strike verification of who exactly has died. "There's a bomb. They drop
it. It explodes," Lisa says. "Then what? Does somebody go down and ask for
somebody's driver's license? Excuse me, sir, can I have your driver's
license, see who you are? Does that happen? I mean, how do we know? How is
it possible to know who ends up living or dying?"
After three years as an imagery analyst, after regularly watching unknown
people die thousands of miles away on a grainy screen, Heather was diagnosed
as suicidal. She estimates -- and the experiences of other drone
whistleblowers back her up -- that alcoholics accounted for a significant
percentage of her unit, and that many of her co-workers had similarly
suicidal thoughts. Two actually did kill themselves.
As Heather's grandfather points out, "She had trouble getting the treatment
she needed. She had trouble finding a doctor because they didn't have the
right security clearance [and] she could be in violation of the law and
could even go to prison for even talking to the wrong therapist about what
was bothering her."
In desperation Heather turned to her mother. "She'd call me up and she'd cry
and she'd be upset, but then she couldn't talk about it," her mother says.
"When you hear your daughter talking to you on the phone, you can that tell
she is in trouble just by the emotion and inflection and the stress that you
can hear in her voice. When you ask her, did you talk to anyone else about
it? She'd say no, we're not allowed to talk to anybody. I have a feeling
that if someone wasn't there for her, she wouldn't be here right now."
Like Heather, Daniel has so far survived his own drone-war-induced mental
health issues, but in his post-drone life he's run into a formidable enemy:
the U.S. government. On August 8, 2014, he estimates that as many as 50
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided his house, seizing documents
and his electronics.
"The government suspects that he is a source of information about the
[drone] program that the government doesn't want out there," says Jesselyn
Radack, his lawyer and herself a former Department of Justice whistleblower.
"To me, that's simply an attempt to silence whistleblowers, and it doesn't
surprise me that that happens to the very few people who have been brave
enough to speak out against the drone program."
If that was the intention, however, the raid -- and the threat it carries
for other whistleblowers -- seems not to have had the desired effect.
Instead, the number of what might be thought of as defectors from the drone
program only seems to be growing. The first to come out was Brandon Bryant,
a former camera operator in October 2013. He was followed by Cian
Westmoreland, a former radio technician, in November 2014. Last November,
Michael Haas and Stephen Lewis, two imagery analysts, joined Westmoreland
and Bryant by speaking out at the launch of Tonje Schei's film Drone. All
four of them also published an open letter to President Obama warning him
that the drone war was escalating terrorism, not containing it.
And just last month, Chris Aaron, a former counterterrorism analyst for the
CIA's drone program, spoke out on a panel at the University of Nevada Law
School. In the relatively near future, Radack recently told Rolling Stone,
four more individuals involved in America's drone wars are planning to offer
their insights into how the program works.
Like Heather and Daniel, many of the former drone operators who have gone
public are struggling with mental health problems. Some of them are also
dealing with substance abuse issues that began as a way to counteract or
dull the horrors of the war they were wagomg and witnessing. "We used to
call alcohol drone fuel because it kept the program going. Everyone drank.
There was a lot of coke, speed, and that sort of thing," imagery analyst
Haas told Rolling Stone. "If the higher ups knew, then they didn't say
anything, but I'm pretty sure they must have known. It was everywhere."
"Imagine If This Was Happening to Us"
In recent months, something has changed for the whistleblowers. There is a
new sense of camaraderie among them, as well as with the lawyers defending
them and a growing group of activist supporters. Most unexpectedly, they are
hearing from the families of victims of drone strikes, thanks to the work of
groups like Reprieve in Great Britain.
In mid-April, for instance, Cian Westmoreland traveled to London and met
Malik Jalal, a Pakistani tribal leader who claims that he has been targeted
by U.S. drones on multiple occasions. Clive Lewis, a member of Parliament
and military veteran, released a photo on Facebook of the historic meeting.
"It's possible that one of the two men I'm [standing] between in this
picture, Cian Westmoreland, was trying to kill the man on my right, Malik
Jalal -- at some stage in the past seven years," Lewis wrote. "Their story
is both amazing and terrifying. At once it shows the growing menace and
destructive capability of unchecked political and military power juxtaposed
with the power of the human spirit and human solidarity."
As that sense of solidarity strengthens and as the distance between the
former hunters and the hunted begins to narrow, the whistleblowers are
beginning to confront some distinctly uncomfortable questions. "We often
hear that drones can see everything by day and by night," a different drone
victim of the February 2010 strike in Uruzgan told filmmaker Kennebeck. "You
can see the difference between a needle and an ant but not people? We were
sitting in the pickup truck, some even on the bed. Did you not see that
there were travelers, women and children?"
When the president and his key officials look at the drone program, they
undoubtedly don't "see" women and children. Instead, they are caught up in a
Hollywood-style vision of imminent danger from terrorists and of the kind of
salvation that a missile launched from thousands of miles away provides. It
is undoubtedly thanks to just this thought process, already deeply embedded
in the American way of war, that not a single candidate for president in
2016 has rejected the drone program.
That is exactly what the whistleblowers feel needs to change. "I just want
people to know that not everybody is a freaking terrorist and we need to
just get out of that mindset. And we just need to see these people as people
-- families, communities, brothers, mothers, and sisters, because that's who
they are," says Lisa. "Imagine if this was happening to us. Imagine if our
children were walking outside of the door and it was a sunny day and they
were afraid because they didn't know if today was the day that something
would fall out of the sky and kill someone close to them. How would we
feel?"
Pratap Chatterjee, a TomDispatch regular, is executive director of
CorpWatch. He is the author of Halliburton's Army: How A Well-Connected
Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. His next book,
Verax, a graphic novel about whistleblowers and mass surveillance
co-authored with Khalil Bendib, will be published by Metropolitan Books in
2017.
[Note: Sonia Kennebeck's National Bird premieres this month at New York's
Tribeca Film Festival and at the San Francisco Film Festival. It will open
in theaters this fall.]
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright Pratap Chatterjee 2016
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176131
