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Der Spiegel
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About Me
- Unrepentantcowboy
- Belmont, Texas
- Rancher, farmer, horseman, writer. Ex-convict. Former marijuana smuggler. Aspire to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. Don't always succeed. The Jesus I believe in was an outlaw. So hated, he received the death penalty. I don't like organized religion, so don't try to save me. Jesus, Abraham and Mohammed worshiped the same God; all would abhor what's being done in their name today.
Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.
ReplyDelete"These moments are like in slow motion," he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant's digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.
"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.
"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pain-continues-after-war-for-american-drone-pilot-a-872726.html
http://armsforthepoor.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteI wonder about the logic behind having two pilots...
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there is a lot of information to process in those cockpits, but could it also be a way to subvert the conscious?
No one person is to be solely responsible - even though you flew the missile I picked the target - and vice versa. Not exactly my opinion, just a thought.
I do however believe that subverting the conscious has been the plan all along for these power hungry war profiteers. They want absolute control over their most precious asset, humans. They don't want us to think or have feelings (big pharmas true goal). What they want is highly trained killing 'machines' with no conscious or foresight.
My heart goes out to this guy and all the other unconscious soldiers, they know not what they do.
Repent, forgive yourself, and revolt.
-J.S.