PDA

Bekijk Volledige Versie : Obama's drone war a 'recruitment tool' for Isis, say US air force whistleblowers



mark61
18-11-15, 22:02
Four former service members – including three sensor operators – issue plea to rethink current airstrike strategy that has ‘fueled feelings of hatred’ toward US

Ed Pilkington in New York and Ewen MacAskill in London

Wednesday 18 November 2015 17.48 GMT

Four former US air force service members, with more than 20 years of experience between them operating military drones, have written an open letter to Barack Obama warning that the program of targeted killings by unmanned aircraft has become a major driving force for Isis and other terrorist groups.

The group of servicemen have issued an impassioned plea to the Obama administration, calling for a rethink of a military tactic that they say has “fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like Isis, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantánamo Bay”.

In particular, they argue, the killing of innocent civilians in drone airstrikes has acted as one of the most “devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world”.

The letter, addressed to Obama, defense secretary Ashton Carter and CIA chief John Brennan, links the signatories’ anxieties directly to last Friday’s terror attacks in Paris. They imply that the abuse of the drone program is causally connected to the outrages.

“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,” they wrote.

The joint statement – from the group who have experience of operating drones over Afghanistan, Iraq and other conflict zones – represents a public outcry from what is understood to be the largest collection of drone whistleblowers in the history of the program. Three of the letter writers were sensor operators who controlled the powerful visual equipment on US Predator drones that guide Hellfire missiles to their targets.

They are Brandon Bryant, 30, who served in the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron and 3rd Special Operations Squadron from 2005 to 2011; Michael Haas, 29, who served in the same squadrons during the same period; and Stephen Lewis, 29, who was with the 3rd Special Operations Squadron between 2005 and 2010.

The fourth whistleblower, Cian Westmoreland, 28, was a technician responsible for the communications infrastructure of the drone program. He served with the 606 Air Control Squadron in Germany and the 73rd Expeditionary Air Control Squadron in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

The four are represented legally by Jesselyn Radack, director of national security and human rights at the nonprofit ExposeFacts. “This is the first time we’ve had so many people speaking out together about the drone program,” she said, pointing out that the men were fully aware that they faced possible prosecution for speaking out.

In the wake of the Paris attacks, Obama has stuck firm to his determination to avoid sending large numbers of US troops to Syria, beyond the limited engagement of special forces. The natural, though unspoken, consequence of such a strategy is a deepening reliance on aerial attacks in which unmanned drones increasingly play a leading part.

The number of lethal airstrikes has ballooned under Obama’s watch. The Pentagon has plans further to increase the number of daily drone flights by 50% by 2019.

From its inception, the drone program has been troubled by reports of mistaken targeting. Classified government documents leaked to the Intercept revealed that up to 90% of the people killed in drone strikes may be unintended, with the disparity glossed over by the recording of unknown victims as “enemies killed in action”.

Monsterlijk gewoon.

In one of the most widely publicised errors, the US government was accused by one of its own officials of making an “outrageous mistake” in October 2011 when it killed the US citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida leader who was also a US citizen and was killed by a CIA drone two weeks previously.

One of the four drone operators who signed the letter to Obama, Brandon Bryant, was part of the team that tracked Anwar al-Awlaki by drone for 10 months shortly before he was killed. In an interview with the Guardian, Bryant said that he was not opposed to drone technology per se, which he saw as having beneficial uses.

“We just understand that in its current form the program is being abused, there’s no transparency, and we need to be open to other solutions.”

Bryant said that in his view he had been made to violate his military oath by being assigned to a mission that killed a fellow American. “We were told that al-Awlaki deserved to die, he deserved to be killed as a traitor, but article 3 of section 2 of the US constitution states that even a traitor deserves a fair trial in front of a jury of his peers.”

Two of the four drone operators have also spoken out in a film about the US program, Drone, that premieres theatrically in New York on Friday. The other two are going public for the first time, having just come forward in the past few weeks.

Obama this week made clear that he would continue to resist putting more boots on the ground in Syria following the Paris attacks. Speaking at the G20 summit in Turkey, he said “part of the reason is that every few months I go to Walter Reed [military hospital] and I see a 25-year-old kid who is paralysed or has lost his limbs, and some of those are people who I have ordered into battle”.

But the former drone operators argue that the strategy is self-defeating, as the high number of civilian casualties and the callousness of drone killings merely propagates anti-US hatred. “Right now it seems politically expedient,” said Cian Westmoreland. “But in the long term the bad side of a Hellfire missile and drones buzzing overhead is the only thing that a lot of these people know of the United States or Britain.”

Bryant accepted that there was no negotiating with extreme, violent terrorists of the type that carried out the Paris attacks. “But you have to prevent such people being created,” he said. “We validate them, we keep this cycle going. Their children are afraid to play out in the sun because that’s when the drones are coming.”

Obama's drone war a 'recruitment tool' for Isis, say US air force whistleblowers | World news | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/obama-drone-war-isis-recruitment-tool-air-force-whistleblowers)

Vier Amerikanen begrijpen het. Van de 320 miljoen.

mark61
18-11-15, 22:13
Life as a drone operator: 'Ever step on ants and never give it another thought?'

In a secluded room at an airbase in Nevada, young men hold the power of life and death over people thousands of miles away. Former servicemen tell their story

When Michael Haas, a former senior airman with the US air force, looks back on the missions he flew over Afghanistan and other conflict zones in a six-year career operating military drones, one of the things he remembers most vividly is the colorful language airmen would use to describe their targets. A team of three would be sitting, he recalls, in a ground control station in Creech air force base outside Las Vegas, staring at computer screens on to which images would be beamed back from high-powered sensors on Predator drones thousands of miles away.

The aim of the missions was to track, and when the conditions were deemed right, kill suspected insurgents. That’s not how they put it, though. They would talk about “cutting the grass before it grows out of control”, or “pulling the weeds before they overrun the lawn”.

And then there were the children. The airmen would be flying the Predators over a village in the tribal areas of Pakistan, say, when a series of smaller black shadows would appear across their screens – telling them that kids were at the scene.

They called them “fun-sized terrorists”.

Haas is one of four former air force drone operators and technicians who as a group have come forward to the Guardian to register their opposition to the ongoing reliance on the technology as the US military’s modern weaponry of choice. Between them, the four men clocked up more than 20 years of direct experience at the coalface of lethal drone programs and were credited with having assisted in the targeted killings of hundreds of people in conflict zones – many of them almost certainly civilians.

As a senior airman in the 15th reconnaissance squadron and 3rd special operations squadron from 2005 to 2011 – a period straddling the presidencies of George W Bush and Barack Obama – Haas participated in targeted killing runs from his computer in Creech that terminated the lives of insurgents in Afghanistan almost 8,000 miles away. He was a sensor operator, controlling the cameras, lasers and other information-gathering equipment on Predator and Reaper drones as well as being responsible for guiding Hellfire missiles to their targets once the pilot sitting next to him had pulled the trigger.

Haas, a 29-year-old, in a Notre Dame baseball cap and Chicago Blackhawks ice hockey jersey, looks too youthful to be burdened by such enormous issues. Yet the existential sensation of killing someone by manipulating a computer joystick has left a deep and lasting impression on him. “Ever step on ants and never give it another thought? That’s what you are made to think of the targets – as just black blobs on a screen. You start to do these psychological gymnastics to make it easier to do what you have to do – they deserved it, they chose their side. You had to kill part of your conscience to keep doing your job every day – and ignore those voices telling you this wasn’t right.”

Haas was relatively lucky, in that his team directly launched only two missile strikes during his 5,000 hours of drone flying. The first of those incidents, in January 2011, involved a group of insurgents in Helmand province, Afghanistan, who were exchanging gunfire with US troops on the ground and were duly eviscerated. “No-doubters”, the targets were called in the cold vocabulary of the military drone business, indicating certainty about their enemy status. Such certainty rarely existed, Haas said.

He has also been spared the burden of knowing the overall number of killings in which he played a part as a cog in the wider machinery of drone warfare. When he left the air force, Haas was given a report card that revealed the tally, but he chose to ignore it.

“They handed me a closed envelope with the number in it, but I never opened it. I didn’t want anything to do with it,” he said.

Brandon Bryant, a staff sergeant who worked with US air force Predator drones between 2005 and 2011 as a sensor operator and imagery analyst, did not get away so lightly. He knows for a fact – he saw it on his screen – that he was directly involved in the deaths of 13 people in five separate Hellfire strikes, one in Iraq and the rest in Afghanistan.

Bryant, 30, his head shaved and tattoos covering the backs of his hands, carries himself like a leader and seems to be driven by a determination to own a personal responsibility for the drone campaign he was involved in for five years and five days.

His first “shot”, as the former drone operators call the strikes, was in Afghanistan, where Bryant helped guide in F-16 fighter aircraft to kill three individuals who he was told were reinforcements coming to join anti-US Taliban forces. But when he “got eyes” on the targets, it was obvious to him from their body movements – they were hunkering down, gesturing, looking around – that they were terrified, suggesting to him that they were unlikely to be trained fighters.

After the strike was completed, when Bryant was back with his squadron, there were high-fives all round. He was celebrated for having “popped his cherry” – he had broken his drone virginity with a killing.

In the fourth of the Hellfire strikes in which Bryant directly participated, his team was called in to take out a group of five tribal individuals and their camel who were travelling through a pass from Pakistan to Afghanistan. They were said to be carrying explosives for use in attacks on US troops.

Bryant, together with a pilot and mission coordinator who formed the other two members of his team, tracked the group for several hours from their computers outside Las Vegas. They flew the Predator drone out of sight and beyond earshot of the targets at about 20,000 feet and a distance of about four nautical miles from the group on the ground.

He was puzzled during that time, because there was no sign of any weapons on the men or in the baggage carried by the camel. The drone team patiently waited for the men to descend the valley and bed in for the night, before they let rip with the Hellfire. Even then, there were no secondary explosions, which made Bryant think that his hunch had probably been right – five men and a camel had been reduced to dust for no apparent reason.

“We waited for those men to settle down in their beds and then we killed them in their sleep. That was cowardly murder,” he said.

These direct incidents were harrowing enough for Bryant. But then, when he was honorably discharged from the air force in 2011, he made the mistake of doing what Haas had refused to do: he opened the envelope with the report card in it that itemized the number of killings in which he had played some assisting role.

The number was 1,626.

The impact of such knowledge, and the myriad other stresses of sitting in a tin box in Nevada tracking individuals for potential assassination on the other side of the globe, has taken a heavy toll on Bryant and other drone operators. Studies have found similar levels of depression and PTSD among drone pilots working behind a bank of computers as among military personnel deployed to the battlefield.

The psychological effect can hit personnel in unexpected ways. Cian Westmoreland was a senior airman based on Spangdahlem air base in Germany, working as a technician to set up the communications infrastructure that acts as the backbone of the drone system.

Though he never pulled the trigger or used a joystick to guide in missiles, the lethal nature of his work was driven home to him when his superior came to his unit one day and said: “We are killing bad guys now, boys.”

Westmoreland was troubled by the disclosure, and from 2009 to this day has been disturbed by recurring nightmares. “I’m in the radio unit flipping switches, with my boss yelling at me to get it up and running. Then all of a sudden it does start working and I realize with a jolt what I’ve done. I run out of the control station and now I’m in a village in Afghanistan and the whole place is burnt out and there’s a woman on the ground covered in soot and a child crying over her. I go up to help the child, but half of her face is blown off and there’s nothing I can do.”

The four former drone operators who talked to the Guardian described the various ways in which they and their peers would try to cope during shifts of up to 12 hours. Airmen would show up to the control station drunk; others would sleep on the job, read comic books or play video games on their secure computers.

Despite the load they were carrying, they were disparaged within the wider air force. “We were looked down upon, because we were wearing flight suits but not sitting in the cockpit of an actual aircraft. Drones were like a joke in the military,” Bryant said.

Toward the end of his service, Haas switched to training new recruits in the technology of drone warfare. That shocked him anew, as he discovered that many of the younger intake were gung-ho about the power they wielded at their fingertips. “They just wanted to kill,” he said.

He remembers one training session with a student in which they were flying live over Afghanistan. The student said that a group of people on the ground looked suspicious.

Why? Haas asked. Because they look like they are up to no good, the student replied.

Would you act on that? the instructor asked. Sure, the student said.

Haas immediately pulled him from his seat, took over the mission himself, and promptly failed the student. “I tried to get the students to understand that preservation of innocent life had to take priority.”

Because he failed the student, Haas was later rebuked by senior officers. They told him that they were short of bodies to keep the drones flying, and they ordered him to pass students in future so that there would be a sufficient number trained and ready to go.

Drone premieres theatrically in North America on Friday in New York. Directed by Tonje Hessen Schei and produced by Flimmer Film, it features former drone operators as well as people in conflict zones living under threat of drone attack.

Life as a drone operator: 'Ever step on ants and never give it another thought?' | World news | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/life-as-a-drone-pilot-creech-air-force-base-nevada)

mark61
18-11-15, 22:14
Hoe zijn deze massamoordenaars dan beter dan die lui in Parijs?

Olive Yao
19-11-15, 16:47
.
"Tomorrow's Battlefield": As U.S. Special Ops enter Syria, growing presence in Africa goes unnoticed

US proxy wars and secret operations in Africa

Democracy Now! 13 november 2015 (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/13/tomorrows_battlefield_as_us_special_ops)

The recent U.S. deployment of special operations forces to Syria expands a global U.S. battlefield that is at a historic size. This year, special ops have been sent to a record 147 countries—75 percent of the nations on the planet. It’s a 145 percent increase from the days of George W. Bush. And it means that on any given day elite U.S. forces are on the ground in 70 to 90 countries. Those shocking numbers are revealed by our guest, the journalist Nick Turse. For years, Turse has been tracking the expansion of global U.S. militarism for the website TomDispatch and other outlets. His latest book, "Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa," focuses on one particular American military battlefield that often goes unnoticed. Turse says the U.S. military is now involved in more than 90 percent of Africa’s 54 nations.

clic (http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/13/tomorrows_battlefield_as_us_special_ops)


Part 2: Nick Turse tracks U.S. Special Operations Forces from Africa to Syria

Democracy Now! 13 november 2015 (http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/11/13/part_2_nick_turse_on_us)

As President Obama deploys special operation forces to Syria, breaking his pledge not to put U.S. troops on the ground, we continue our conversation with journalist Nick Turse, who has been tracking the expansion of global U.S. militarism for the website TomDispatch and The Intercept. Turse also discusses his new book, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa. "Africa Command claims they only have one base on the continent, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti," Turse says. "Within a 10-mile radius there is actually another base."


Part 3: Nick Turse on how secret U.S. drone outposts create ill will in countries across Africa

Democracy Now! vrijdag 18 november 2015 (http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/11/18/part_3_nick_turse_on_how)

Journalist Nick Turse talks about his new investigation into secret U.S. drone outposts across Africa. While U.S. Africa Command maintains there is only one U.S. base on the continent — Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti — Turse says there are actually dozens of U.S. military outposts and access points all across Africa. "People on the ground in these countries, they know what’s going on, generally, even if people in the United States are blind to it," Turse says. "And I think it creates a lot of ill will."

clic (http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/11/18/part_3_nick_turse_on_how)

barfly
19-11-15, 21:19
Hoe zijn deze massamoordenaars dan beter dan die lui in Parijs?

Die lui in Parijs zijn menselijke drones.,,

mark61
19-11-15, 21:55
Die lui in Parijs zijn menselijke drones.,,

Hee waar kom jij opeens vandaan? Al die tijd stiekem meegelezen? :hihi:

Welkom terug!


Ja, het zijn de poor man's drones. Al denk ik wel dat ze wat meer inbreng in de besluitvorming hebben dan een Predator.

mark61
19-11-15, 21:56
Tis wel stilletjes, zo'n topic.

Niet gepaste vergelijking zekers. En veel te veel tekst, in het Engels ook nog.

Terwijl Revisor toch zijn vingers erbij kan aflikken.

mark61
19-11-15, 22:00
Nick Turse

:duim:

Dat hele TomDispatch (http://www.tomdispatch.com/) is geweldig. Waar hij de drijvende kracht van is.

Nick Turse (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-turse/)