I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
1

*(I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on | Heather Linebaugh | The Guardian)

Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I’d start with: “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?” And: “How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” Or even more pointedly: “How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?”

**Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.
**
I knew the names of some of the young soldiers I saw bleed to death on the side of a road. I watched dozens of military-aged males die in Afghanistan, in empty fields, along riversides, and some right outside the compound where their family was waiting for them to return home from the mosque.

The US and British militariesinsistclaim that this is an expert program, but it’s curious that they feel the need to deliver faulty information, few or no statistics about civilian deaths and twisted technology reports on the capabilities of our UAVs. These specific incidents are not isolated, and the civilian casualty ratehas not changed, despite what our defense representatives might like to tell us.

What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: “The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, and not a weapon?” I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.

It’s also important for the public to grasp that there are human beings operating and analysing intelligence these UAVs. I know because I was one of them, and nothing can prepare you for an almost daily routine of flying combat aerial surveillance missions over a war zone. UAV proponents claim that troops who do this kind of work are not affected by observing this combat because they are never directly in danger physically.

But here’s the thing: I may not have been on the ground in Afghanistan, but I watched parts of the conflict in great detail on a screen for days on end. I know the feeling you experience when you see someone die. Horrifying barely covers it. And when you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience. UAV troops are victim to not only the haunting memories of this work that they carry with them, but also the guilt of always being a little unsure of how accurate their confirmations of weapons or identification of hostile individuals were.

**Of course, we are trained to not experience these feelings, and we fight it, and become bitter. Some troops seek help in mental health clinics provided by the military, but we are limited on who we can talk to and where, because of the secrecy of our missions. I find it interesting that the suicide statistics in this career field aren’t reported, nor are the data on how many troops working in UAV positions are heavily medicated for depression, sleep disorders and anxiety.
**
Recently, the Guardian ran a commentary by Britain’s secretary of state for defence, Philip Hammond. I wish I could talk to him about the two friends and colleagues I lost, within a year of leaving the military, to suicide. I am sure he has not been notified of that little bit of the secret UAV program, or he would surely take a closer look at the full scope of the program before defending it again.

The UAVs in the Middle East are used as a weapon, not as protection, and as long as our public remains ignorant to this, this serious threat to the sanctity of human life – at home and abroad – will continue.*

2

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

These are the comments of someone who has actually worked on this program.

3

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

10.25.2013
A DRONE WARRIOR’S TORMENT: EX-AIR FORCE PILOT BRANDON BRYANT ON HIS TRAUMA FROM REMOTE KILLING10.25.2013
A DRONE WARRIOR’S TORMENT: EX-AIR FORCE PILOT BRANDON BRYANT ON HIS TRAUMA FROM REMOTE KILLING

TRANSCRIPTWe look at how the United States uses drones in war, and their impact, through the eyes of one of the first U.S. drone operators to speak out. Former U.S. Air Force pilot Brandon Bryant served as a sensor operator for the Predator program from 2007 to 2011, manning the camera on the unmanned aerial vehicles that carried out attacks overseas. After he left the active duty in the Air Force, he was presented with a certificate that credited his squadron for 1,626 kills. In total, Bryant says he was involved in seven missions in which his Predator fired a missile at a human target, and about 13 people died in those strikes — actions he says left him traumatized. “The clinical definition of PTSD is an anxiety disorder associated with witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event,” Bryant says. “Think how you would feel if you were part of something that you felt violated the Constitution.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to look at how the United States uses drones, and their impact—this time through the eyes of one of the first U.S. drone pilots to speak out. Former Air Force pilot Brandon Bryant served as a sensor operator for the U.S. Air Force Predator program from 2007 to 2011. He manned the camera on the unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones. After he left the active-duty Air Force, he was presented with a certificate that credited his squadron for 1,626 kills.
AMY GOODMAN: In total, Bryant says he was involved in seven missions in which his Predator fired a missile at a target, and about 13 people died in those strikes. He describes the grisly scenes he watched unfold on his monitor as an Air Force drone operator in a new article in GQ magazine, “Confessions of a Drone Warrior” by Matt Power. He joins us now in our New York studio.
Brandon Bryant, welcome to Democracy Now!
BRANDON BRYANT: Thank you for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Place us in the room in 2007 with your first strike. Describe what happened.
BRANDON BRYANT: It was roughly around January 26, the end of January. And I had gotten on shift. I used to be what they called a multi-aircraft control qualified sensor operator, which is where a pilot controls multiple drones, and then a sensor operator controls one drone. So, you have a sensor operator basically in control of the aircraft until the pilot decides to take over. And that was my typical mission and would usually result in no shots being fired. And that—the day of my first shot, I was told to go in—
AMY GOODMAN: Where were you?
BRANDON BRYANT: I was in Nevada. And—
AMY GOODMAN: Which base?
BRANDON BRYANT: Nellis. And—
AMY GOODMAN: What did the room look like?
BRANDON BRYANT: The room? The room is not necessarily a room. It’s a trailer. It’s like a eight-by-20 trailer, kind of the same size as a Formula One racing car. And so, I was told to go in there and do this. And we came across—it was a troops-in-contact situation, where guys were firing from the top of a hill to guys on the bottom of a hill at—
AMY GOODMAN: In what country?
BRANDON BRYANT: Afghanistan. And the guys at the bottom of the hill were U.S. forces, and these guys were—needed air support. And the—we were about to fire on the guys on the top of the hill, and we were told to back off, and an F-16 was going to drop. But the F-16 came across three individuals a short distance away, and they wanted us to fire on those guys, because they thought that those guys were coming in to reinforce.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, this was a nighttime operation?
BRANDON BRYANT: Yeah, it was.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So you were basically dealing with infrared as you were looking at these figures?
BRANDON BRYANT: Correct. And so, when we came across these guys, the two individuals in the front were having a heated discussion, and you could see that they were talking about something. And the guy in the back was kind of watching the sky. And they weren’t really in a hurry to do anything. And so, we got the confirmation that they had weapons, and we were told to fire. And in that situation—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, does this confirmation come from troops in the field? Or does it come from—
BRANDON BRYANT: No, it came from somewhere else. You got to understand that the whole operation procedures is like a web, and, like, you’re dealing with people from multiple locations from all over the world. And so, when we—
AMY GOODMAN: You’re speaking—you’re hearing them in headphones, and you’re watching them on a computer monitor.
BRANDON BRYANT: Yeah, we’re like—there’s like a chat program. Like so, that’s the easiest way to communicate because of the satellite delay. But we weren’t in radio communications with anyone except for the guys that were on the ground, so we heard them asking for air support.
And so, we got confirmation to fire on these guys. And the way that they reacted really made me doubt their involvement, because the guys over there, the locals over there, have to protect themselves from the Taliban just as much as armed—us—we do, as U.S. military personnel. And so, I think that they were probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the way that—I’ve been accused of using poetic imagery to describe it, but I watched this guy bleed out, the guy in the back, and his right leg above the knee was severed in the strike. And his—he bled out through his femoral artery. And it—
AMY GOODMAN: You saw that on your computer screen?
BRANDON BRYANT: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s that detailed?
BRANDON BRYANT: Yeah, it’s pixelated, but, I mean, you could—you could see that it was a human being, and you could see that—what he was doing, and you could see the crater from the drone—from the Hellfire missile, and you could see probably the body pieces that were around this guy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the other two that were in this strike?
BRANDON BRYANT: They were completely destroyed.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Blown apart.
BRANDON BRYANT: Blown apart.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you watched this guy bleed out for how long?
BRANDON BRYANT: You know, it’s the femoral artery, so he could have bled out really fast. It was cold outside, you know, wintertime. It seemed like forever to me, but we—as the Predator drone can stay in the air for like 18 to 32 hours, and so they just had us watch and do battle damage assessment to make sure that—to see if anyone would come and pick up the body parts or anyone really cared who these people were. And we watched long enough that the body cooled on the ground, and they called us off target.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, there was a—sometime later, you think that—you’ve written that you thought you killed a child, as well.
BRANDON BRYANT: There’s—yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about that particular day?
BRANDON BRYANT: That was—I was still feeling the effects of my first Hellfire shot. And, like, you have to understand that what we did over in Afghanistan and Iraq there, it’s constitutionally viable. We were given permission by the American public to go to war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And so, when this specific Hellfire shot, we were—the intel that we were given is that there was this commander and some of his people inside this building. And they had been watching it for multiple days. They had been keeping track of people that had gone in and out. And they had made the determination that those were the only people that were in there. And something ran around the corner, and it looked like a little person. And it made me realize that, you know, we can have all the intel in the world, and it’s still not going to be perfect. And as clean as these types of strikes can be, they’re in reality really dirty.
And military operations—being part of the military, talking about military operations, like, that’s—that’s just the nature of what it is. And the real—the real debate should be about places other than where we went to war and, you know, violating the constitutional rights of an American citizen who was in another country, who was killed without due process, and that type of thing. And my—my goal in all of this is to talk about, like, these aren’t killer robots. They’re not like unfeeling people behind this whole thing. There are—there are some people that are extremely scary when talking to them, and there was one individual who got the word “infidel” tattooed in Arabic on his side, and he had Hellfire tattoos marking every shot. But that’s an extreme. Most—
AMY GOODMAN: You mean who you work with, who was—
BRANDON BRYANT: Who I worked with.
AMY GOODMAN: —who was killing people on the computer—
BRANDON BRYANT: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —with the drone strikes.
BRANDON BRYANT: Right. And that’s an extreme personality. But there’s a lot of like—those people are so few in the community, so few in the military, that—but they’re looked at as like that’s who everyone is. And that’s not the case. Like, there’s people behind there.
AMY GOODMAN: Brandon, in this case where you believe you killed a child, the report was written up as killing a dog?
BRANDON BRYANT: No, the report actually said enemies killed in action, executed to standards. Like, that’s what the after-action report said. It was very, very antiseptic, I guess is the word.
AMY GOODMAN: Mm-hmm.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And help me understand this. When you’re doing these drone strikes, is it basically you’re on duty for a set number of hours controlling one Predator, let’s say, or one drone that’s over a particular area, or are you specifically assigned to particular missions and called in?
BRANDON BRYANT: No. So, there’s a shift that goes on. So, there’s multiple shifts in the day. And typically, you are assigned a mission on that shift, because crew continuity is so viable. They want the same types of people on the same missions, because that means that less explanation has to happen between crews, and there’s more accountability there, internal accountability. And so, but the shifts, typically they were 11-and-a-half-hour shifts with a small break in the middle, where you’re flying four-and-a-half hours with a small break, four-and-a-half hours, or even longer depending on how many people we had available to fly that day.
AMY GOODMAN: Why have you decided, Brandon, to speak out?
BRANDON BRYANT: Because there’s so much misinformation out there, that—so much speculation, and—and that’s wrong. The United States government hasn’t really done a good job of humanizing the people that do it. And everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke, that we are video-game warriors, that we’re Nintendo warriors. And that’s—that’s really not the case. And these—the people that do the job are just as legit and just as combat-oriented as anyone else. And I’m not like their official spokesperson. In fact, I’m probably the most hated person in the entire community right now.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
BRANDON BRYANT: Because I have spoken out, and they’re—they’re hurt. They feel like I’m trying to hurt them, and that’s not the case. I’m trying to give them credence, you know? But the problem is, like, again, we’re going back to like the Constitution and what is viable and what is not inside and outside of war zones, what the people of the American—of America has permission—what they have given us.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about a certificate in which your squadron, the 3rd Special Operations Squadron at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, was credited for 1,626 kills. Air Force Special Operations Command spokeswoman, Captain Belena Marquez, responded to your claims about this in an email to the Air Force Times. She wrote, quote, “Only a very small percentage of that [enemy killed in action] total can be attributed to any one crew member when assessing actual kinetic activity.”
BRANDON BRYANT: And I think that’s a—that’s the misconception there, is I’ve never taken credit for these kills. They’re not my kills. Like, I didn’t drop the bombs or shoot the people on the ground. These are all the number of people that have perished in all the operations that I was told that I participated in over the five-and-a-half-year period that I actually operated. And that’s a completely viable number, if you look at it. And some people could be surprised that it’s not larger. And if it’s the number that’s solely attributed to the 3rd Special Operations Squadron, then—and in the first place, I don’t know why they gave that certificate, or whatever it was, to me, because I never cared about it in the first place. But like—
AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel you suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD?
BRANDON BRYANT: Well, you know, the clinical definition of PTSD is an anxiety disorder associated with witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event. And it’s such a blanket term that so many people are like, “Oh, you can’t get PTSD from this or that.” And it’s a widely—it’s a wider phenomenon than I think a lot of people realize.
And my deal is more moral injury, like think of it—think how you would feel when—if you were part of something that you felt violated the Constitution. And, I mean, I swore an oath, you know? I swore to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And how do you feel if, like—you can’t use “I obeyed orders” as an excuse. It’s “I obeyed the Constitution, regardless of lawful or unlawful orders.” And lawful orders follow the Constitution. And that, that’s the hardest part.
And I was really unprepared for—for it. I tried to get out multiple times and do a different job, and I was consistently told that it’s the needs of the Air Force come first, and so I did it. I buckled down, and I did it. I did the job. I did it as best as I could, because I was scared that someone would come in, and they wouldn’t do it very well. And I—I mean, I paid a spiritual and mental price for that. And I think that’s something that people really discount, because I didn’t take any physical injury through it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Brandon, I want to thank you for being with us. When I asked earlier about the dog, a child being identified as a dog, though it didn’t appear in the final report, it did come out in the chatter, right, as the killings were happening?
BRANDON BRYANT: Right. It said, upon—like, the person who was—I mean, there’s multiple people that review the feed, and the person that was in the chat said, “Upon further review, it was a dog.” So—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us. You’re going to speak today also at the United Nations?
BRANDON BRYANT: Yeah, I’ve been given a little—a little time to address the folks there. It’s a pretty big responsibility, I think.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, thank you for talking to us here at Democracy Now! Brandon Bryant is a former sensor operator for the U.S. Air Force Predator program, manned the camera on the unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones. After he left the active-duty Air Force in 2011, he was presented with a certificate that credited his squadron with 1,626 kills. This isDemocracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

From Democracy Now | Original Article

[video]http://www.democracynow.org/2013/10/25/a_drone_warriors_torment_ex_air[/video]

4

Confessions of a Drone Warrior

10.23.2013
CONFESSIONS OF A DRONE WARRIOR
Categories: Uncategorized
He was an experiment, really. One of the first recruits for a new kind of warfare in which men and machines merge. He flew multiple missions, but he never left his computer. He hunted top terrorists, saved lives, but always from afar. He stalked and killed countless people, but could not always tell you precisely what he was hitting. Meet the 21st-century American killing machine. who’s still utterly, terrifyingly human.

http://www.gq.com/images/news-and-politics/2013/11/confessions-of-a-drone-warrior/confessions-of-a-drone-warrior-gq-magazine-november-2013-01.jpg

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his console, the image showed the midwinter landscape of eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province—a palette of browns and grays, fields cut to stubble, dark forests climbing the rocky foothills of the Hindu Kush. He zoomed the camera in on the suspected insurgents, each dressed in traditional shalwar kameez,long shirts and baggy pants. He knew nothing else about them: not their names, not their thoughts, not the thousand mundane and profound details of their lives.
He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherd’s staffs. Still, the directive from somewhere above, a mysterious chain of command that led straight to his headset, was clear: confirmed weapons. He switched from the visible spectrum—the muted grays and browns of “day-TV”—to the sharp contrast of infrared, and the insurgents’ heat signatures stood out ghostly white against the cool black earth. A safety observer loomed behind him to make sure the “weapon release” was by the book. A long verbal checklist, his targeting laser locked on the two men walking in front. A countdown—three…two…one…—then the flat delivery of the phrase “missile off the rail.” Seventy-five hundred miles away, a Hellfire flared to life, detached from its mount, and reached supersonic speed in seconds.
It was quiet in the dark, cold box in the desert, except for the low hum of machines.
He kept the targeting laser trained on the two lead men and stared so intently that each individual pixel stood out, a glowing pointillist dot abstracted from the image it was meant to form. Time became almost ductile, the seconds stretched and slowed in a strange electronic limbo. As he watched the men walk, the one who had fallen behind seemed to hear something and broke into a run to catch up with the other two. Then, bright and silent as a camera flash, the screen lit up with white flame.
Airman First Class Brandon Bryant stared at the scene, unblinking in the white-hot clarity of infrared. He recalls it even now, years later, burned into his memory like a photo negative: “The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”
That was Brandon Bryant’s first shot. It was early 2007, a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, and Bryant was a remotely-piloted-aircraft sensor operator—a “sensor” for short—part of a U.S. Air Force squadron that flew Predator drones in the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan. Beginning in 2006, he worked in the windowless metal box of a Ground Control Station (GCS) at Nellis Air Force Base, a vast sprawl of tarmac and maintenance hangars at the edge of Las Vegas.
The airmen kept the control station dark so they could focus on controlling their MQ-1B Predators circling two miles above the Afghan countryside. Bryant sat in a padded cockpit chair. He had a wrestler’s compact build, a smooth-shaved head, and a piercing ice blue gaze frequently offset by a dimpled grin. As a sensor, his job was to work in tandem with the drone’s pilot, who sat in the chair next to him. While the pilot controlled the drone’s flight maneuvers, Bryant acted as the Predator’s eyes, focusing its array of cameras and aiming its targeting laser. When a Hellfire was launched, it was a joint operation: the pilot pulled a trigger, and Bryant was responsible for the missile’s “terminal guidance,” directing the high-explosive warhead by laser to its desired objective. Both men wore regulation green flight suits, an unironic Air Force nod to the continuity of military decorum in the age of drone warfare.
Since its inception, the drone program has been largely hidden, its operational details gathered piecemeal from heavily redacted classified reports or stage-managed media tours by military public-affairs flacks. Bryant is one of very few people with firsthand experience as an operator who has been willing to talk openly, to describe his experience from the inside. While Bryant considers leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for their principles, he’s cautious about discussing some of the details to which his top-secret clearance gave him access. Still, he is a curtain drawn back on the program that has killed thousands on our behalf.
Despite President Obama’s avowal earlier this year that he will curtail their use, drone strikes have continued apace in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. With enormous potential growth and expenditures, drones will be a center of our policy for the foreseeable future. (By 2025, drones will be an $82 billion business, employing an additional 100,000 workers.) Most Americans—61 percent in the latest Pew survey—support the idea of military drones, a projection of American power that won’t risk American lives.
And yet the very idea of drones unsettles. They’re too easy a placeholder or avatar for all of our technological anxieties—the creeping sense that screens and cameras have taken some piece of our souls, that we’ve slipped into a dystopia of disconnection. Maybe it’s too soon to know what drones mean, what unconsidered moral and ethical burdens they carry. Even their shape is sinister: the blunt and featureless nose cone, like some eyeless creature that has evolved in darkness.
For Bryant, talking about them has become a sort of confessional catharsis, a means of processing the things he saw and did during his six years in the Air Force as an experimental test subject in an utterly new form of warfare.
Looking back, it was really little more than happenstance that had led him to that box in the desert. He’d been raised poor by his single mom, a public-school teacher in Missoula, Montana, and he struggled to afford tuition at the University of Montana. In the summer of 2005, after tagging along with a buddy to the Army recruiting office, he wandered into the Air Force office next door. His friend got a bad feeling and bailed at the last minute, but Bryant had already signed his papers. In short order he was running around at Lackland Air Force Base during Warrior Week in the swelter of a Texas summer. He wasn’t much for military hierarchy, but he scored high on his aptitude tests and was shunted into intelligence, training to be an imagery analyst. He was told he would be like “the guys that give James Bond all the information that he needs to get the mission done.”

http://www.gq.com/images/news-and-politics/2013/11/confessions-of-a-drone-warrior/confessions-of-a-drone-warrior-gq-magazine-november-2013-02.jpg

The Air Force’s go-to drone: The MQ-1 Predator.
Article by Matthew Power – From GQ | Original Article

5

Re: Confessions of a Drone Warrior

6

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

^ very upsetting to read :(. Where will it all end :hinna:

7

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

Only people upset at dead terrorists are the terrorist sympathizers. Btw, if you want to blame anyone for drone attacks blame Taliban, Alqueda, and foreign terrorists who have taken over the tribal areas. They are responsible for every innocent death in the region.

8

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

There are innocent children reffered to in those reports, it is upsetting to read how they died!

9

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

The proponents of drone strikes justify the deaths of innocents caught up as a result to be 'collateral damage', the terrorists also justify the deaths of innocents as result of their terror strikes to be collateral damage as well.

Shouldn't there be any difference in how a rag tag militia behaves as compared to the most powerful empire the world has seen to date?

10

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on


Sure... the Bush slogan ... "you are with us or against us", there is no middle ground, the secular extremism.

11

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

Sure, but when terrorists hide in populated areas there is going to be collateral damage. Btw, the report by the govt of Pakistan shows that civilian causalities are far less than what anti drones activists would have us believed. This is from official report submitted to the Parliament by the interior ministry.

Pakistan says drone strikes killed 67 civilians since 2008 | Al Jazeera America

12

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

I have not seen any document listing the complete names of people killed, have you?

If this is the definition of terrorists killed, I agree with you no civilians have been killed.

“It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent,” the Times reports. “Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.”

13

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

mmm… even after a millions of dead innocents around the globe esp since 1945… what would a person “supporting” and “defending” the fascist american empire be called… i think the word will need to be invented.

14

Re: I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on

Its easy to carry out attacks in other countries without any prosecution disregarding collateral damage. On the other hand whats the progress on the 911 case going on in the US?

http://www.paklinks.com/gs/world-affairs/551045-911-trial-begins.html