We sat in a box for nearly twelve hour shifts. All the lights were usually off except for
the light coming from the monitors.
I remember watching a wedding. I mean, these were people enjoying themselves. These were
people celebrating like... a wedding, you know?
But someone in that wedding was a bad person.
We're the ultimate voyeurs. The ultimate peeping Toms. No one's going to catch us and we're
getting orders to take these people's lives.
It was just point
and click.
I had no idea what it was. I had no idea what I was in for. I didn't know where Creech Air
Force Base was. I wasn't even twenty years old at that point - when I discovered I was
going to be in there - so it was all very new and different.
Yeah, I thought it was the coolest damn thing in the world, I was like: "Oh man!" You know,
I get to pay a video game all day!
And then the reality hits you, that you may have to kill somebody.
In our control room, you know, they had a picture of September the eleventh - of the
second plane hitting the building - just to try to make you pissed off about it all over
again right before you go and do your job.
These guys have to die, these guys deserve to die and you've got to make it happen.
There's always been a connection between the world of war and the world of entertainment
and I call this phenomenon "militainment", where the military world is actually now pulling
tools from the world of entertainment to do its job better.
The military has invested in creating video games that they're using as recruiting tools.
How do we find our ATNX pilots? What makes a good ATNX pilot?
If you can answer that question or I can answer that question, then you could make a lot of
money for the air force right now because we don't know.
We're trying to get our arms around what really does make the best candidate for automatic
airplanes and how do we identify these people earlier?
Video gamers do have a skill set that is very important and actually enhances the skillset
of drone operators.
So, when I talk to people about this I say: "We don't need Top Gun pilots anymore, we
need revenge of the nerds."
I felt like I was in power and I could have absolute control. You know, I get these sons
of bitches in the crosshairs and, you know, I can kill them right now. It's, you know,
it's like it was easy.
It was too easy.
You never know who you're killing because you never actually see a face.
You just have silhouettes and it's easy to have that detachment and that lack of empathy
for human life and it's easy to really just think of them as something else.
You know, they were not people. You know, they're just terrorists.
For me, every single day you put on that uniform you were involved.
So many of those shots where you depend on the word of others but they don't have to
take that shot, they don't have to bear that burden.
I'm the one that has to bear that burden. The pilot's the one that has to bear that
burden. My mission controller's the one that's got to bear that burden.
So it's easy for them to say: "Yeah, shoot it, yeah that's him, shoot it!" but they don't
have to do the action and they don't have to live with the repurcussions if it turns
out that that's not our guy and we just made orphans out of all these children.
You know, they don't have to live with that.
I do.
Is there a war between the United States and Pakistan? No.
Is the United States bombing in Pakistan week in, week out? Yes it is.
Nowhere has been more observed and more bombed by the CIA than Waziristan.
The first recorded CIA strike in Pakistan took place in 2004. The number of those strikes
has just accelerated to strikes every two or three days.
Really an industrialised killing programme.
It's a very different youth group we're dealing with - that we're focing into this environment
of killing - and it's a very different form of killing.
When you're, for example, in Nevada and the person or people you're killing are ten thousand
miles away and only visible to you as "bug splat" on the screen, which is the term that video
operators use...
We have something in the armed forces that we call the warrior ethos. You destroy that
when you go out and kill people and you're totally involved.
I think the drone business, the distance imposed, amplifies this a hundred fold. And the distinction
between killing for state purposes under just war theory and killing for state purposes
with no vulnerability is, I think, the difference between killing in a way that is recognised
and legalised even, and murder.
How did we get to the point where we're no longer warriors, we're murderers for the state?
The further removed we are from the victim, the more we're likely to act harshly.
Psychologists have been showing this in experiments going back decades. We know this is the case.
Distance creates indifference and I think that's something that's really not factored
in enough in terms of the drone strikes: the psychology of distance.
Come on.
People thought that it was like flipping a switch. You're in war, you're out of war,
you're in war, you're out of war.
But every time Ieft I was still fighting the war.
Anyone who had any sort of mental issues or qualms about it was told to just shut up and
colour. Do your job. No one wants to hear your bitching.
If you wanted to go and talk to a therapist about it, they would say: "Well if you do
your security clearance is going to get taken away."
That scared a lot of people.
But we could go and see a chaplain and the general response that we would get is: "It's
part of god's plan."
Our war on terror begins with al qaeda but it does not end there.
It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.
It just feels like we're going through a bad science fiction novel. If we duhumanise war,
if we take the human aspect out of it, what's to stop us just sending a bunch of automaton
robots into another country and let them wipe out the entire population?
People were writing about this in, like, the early 1900s - what could happen - and we're
watching it happen.