NOVEMBER 24, 201510:29AM
Former drone pilots are speaking out against the
callous culture behind the winged missiles. Photo: Isaac Brekken, Getty Images.
Nick Whigham
OPERATORS of US military drones are taking bath salts
and drinking alcohol while on shift, according to a number of former drone
pilots speaking out against the callous culture of the program.
Michael Haas would regularly snort a couple bumps of
bath salts to get him through his eleven hour shift. He said it was commonplace
for operators to use synthetic drugs — that wouldn’t be picked up in testing —
while carrying out targeted assassinations.
Speaking at a press conference in New York, Haas,
along with other former drone pilots spoke about the heartless culture of the
program and the mental consequences for those involved. They told of a
workplace where Afghani and Iraqi children were referred to as “fun sized
terrorists” and killing them earned the sickening euphemism of “cutting the
grass before it got too long.”
The event coincided with the release of a new
documentary called Drone that follows the experience of Brandon
Bryant who suffered immense mental anguish from his time as a drone operator.
The psychological impact of sitting in a darkened room
in front of a computer screen and killing people on the other side of the world
has become a major issue for the
military over the
last couple years. The stress and trauma experienced by those in the job has
caused over 1,000 US drone pilots to quit and the military is scrambling to
explain why.
The latest instance of drone pilots speaking out,
along with the release of the documentary from Norwegian filmmaker Tonje Hessen
Schei, has thrust the issue back into the spotlight with increased urgency.
Bryant remembers telling his training officers that he
didn’t think he would be able to kill people from a comfortable chair in the
Nevada desert. But the response was unsympathetic.
“You took an oath,” he was told.
“If you wanted to go and talk to a therapist about it,
they would say; ‘well if you do, you’re security clearance in going to get
taken away’, and that scared a lot of people,” he told filmmakers.
Soon enough he was honouring that oath and carrying
out drone strikes against faceless individuals in Afghanistan. He would point
and click, and then watch as the figures on the screen would change colour as
their bodies grew cold.
At an emotionally charged point in the film, he
recounts his first deadly strike.
“It’s January so it’s cold up in the mountains of
Afghanistan and I watch this man bleed out ... The missile had taken off one of
his legs, right above the knee,” he said. “He’s rolling around on the ground
and I imagined his last moments. What were his last thoughts? Was he cursing
us? Was he asking his god for our forgiveness?”
Brandon Bryant has been vocal about the perils of the drone program.Source:Supplied
The way in which his guilt and trauma manifested
itself still weighs heavily on Bryant.
“My post traumatic stress started manifesting itself
as like a manic need to do better. I flew more missions than anybody else
because I had that feeling of guilt, so I took up responsibility,” he said.
“Sixteen hundred and twenty-six people were killed in
the operations that I took part of.”
For many others, they turned to drugs such as
synthetic marijuana, bath salts and alcohol in an effort to “bend reality and
try to picture yourself not being there,” Haas told reporters.
“The biggest issue is the non accountability,” Bryant
added.
For him, the money was good but it cost him his
humanity. Suffering from PTSD he returned home to sleep on his mum’s couch and
whatever money he put aside quickly evaporated.
“I spent all the money the reserves paid me on alcohol
until I ran out of money,” he said. It was a period he described in the
documentary as the lowest point in his life.
“Apparently I had my handgun on the coffee table and
my mum got home one day. I don’t remember this but she thinks I was going to
kill myself,” he recalled.
While the mental health of US drone pilots has become
a growing political issue in America, so too has the effectiveness of the
policy in combating extremist militants. A number of reports have cast doubt
over the accuracy of the strikes as well as the lasting impact they have on
community sentiment in the target countries.
In 2013 The Atlantic wrote an article
outlining “how drones create more terrorists.”
Twelve months earlier, The New York Times published as an article making the same argument.
“They (militants) are not driven by ideology but
rather by a sense of revenge and despair,” the Times wrote of the
impact of the drone program.
The White House has repeatedly denied the link but
it’s one that Bryant and his fellow drone whistleblowers believe to be real.
“We kill four and create 10 (militants),” Bryant said.
“If you kill someone’s father, uncle or brother who had nothing to do with
anything, their families are going to want revenge.”
It was among a list of grievances raised by Bryant,
Haas and two other former drone pilots in a letter addressed to President Obama in which they
called for greater scrutiny over the country’s drone program.
“When the guilt of our roles in facilitating this
systematic loss of innocent life became too much, all of us succumbed to PTSD,”
the letter said.
“We cannot sit silently by and witness tragedies like
the attacks in Paris, knowing the devastating effects the drone program has
overseas and at home.”
Airman use a ground control station cockpit to remotely pilot aircraft during a training mission at an air base in Nevada. Photo: Isaac Brekken/Getty ImagesSource:AFP
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