Obama’s approach to killing children

Der Spiegel: For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn’t be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It’s the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren’t flying through the air. They’re just sitting at the controls.

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.

“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?

When Bryant left the container that day, he stepped directly into America: dry grasslands stretching to the horizon, fields and the smell of liquid manure. Every few seconds, a light on the radar tower at the Cannon Air Force Base flashed in the twilight. There was no war going on there.

Modern warfare is as invisible as a thought, deprived of its meaning by distance. It is no unfettered war, but one that is controlled from small high-tech centers in various places in the world. The new (way of conducting) war is supposed to be more precise than the old one, which is why some call it “more humane.” It’s the war of an intellectual, a war United States President Barack Obama has promoted more than any of his predecessors. [Continue reading…]

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3 thoughts on “Obama’s approach to killing children

  1. KPRyan

    I’m afraid there will be one hell of an awakening in store soon for all of us residing in the USA. So much evil over such a long period of time must surely attract negative reprocusions. I’m seriously questioning the validity of the Newtown shooting case (and the one 2 days earlier in Portland) yet if the story behind those shootings advertised on TV is legit, it tends to make a certain amount of sense. Innocent life is innocent life. If a nation destroys innocent lives of another nation that finds itself helpless to either avenge or halt the deaths, it seems only fair that a higher or more powerful authority would require similar deaths in the offensive nation.

  2. eugene

    These people are mercenaries. The American military has been nothing but mercenaries for a long, long time. They kill for money just like a Mafia hitman. I came away from my military stint sickened by what I heard and saw. What a bunch of liers and manipulators. The trouble is they hide behind a wall of “saving lives, improving a country, religious words” and like fictions. There is a certain percentage that just plain like killing. Anyone with a soul comes back mentally damaged or they have retreated so deep into patriotic rhetoric as to really believe their own words.

  3. delia ruhe

    The drone-delivered hellfire missile is the ultimate Chickenhawk technology — and the ultimate war crime. Its direct predecessor is the Nazi buzzbomb. Is it any wonder that half the American population is so terrified of the United Nations?

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