Guilt-ridden American drone pilots continue to quit in unprecedented numbers. One former secret mission operator, Brandon Bryant, who’s received a whistleblower award, spoke to RT of the horrors of indiscriminate killing from a safe distance.
“The people that are giving the order to kill – they don’t care who gets killed as long as their target gets attacked… they’ll take out however many people they can in order to get their results,” Bryant says.
The former pilot received the German Whistleblower Award for revealing details of operations taking place at the Ramstein base, specifically, its role in transferring information between the US and its CIA missions in North Africa, Afghanistan and the Middle East. He was among the first to bring into question the role the base was playing.
Earlier this year, Bryant spoke to RT and discussed the details of his former job. He explained that it is not about the idea of drones, but about who controls them, to what ends, and how transparent the operation is. He also mentioned about the physiological aspect of being in a virtual cockpit.
“We killed people who we really didn’t know who they were, and there was no oversight. And I just know that the inside of the entire program was diseased,” he said.
“I actually talked to a lady whose husband and brother were killed in a drone strike. I talked to her face to face, and she asked me why her husband and brother had to die… they weren’t bad guys. And I just looked at her and said – ‘I don’t know’”, he confessed. “And that’s not really the best thing that I can tell someone who’s asking questions about why someone that they cared about was killed, and they need to know the answers.
“The really true, hard answer is to say that I’m sorry – a mistake happened, and I’m doing everything that I can to prevent further mistakes from happening,” he added.
Bryant’s revelations about Ramstein ended up highlighting the existing debate and criticism in Germany and elsewhere about the human collateral damage and legality of US drone warfare. There are also questions if it is legal under the German constitution to host drones at the air base in the south west of Germany, given Bryant’s revelations.
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