Portrait of a Drone Killer: ‘I Have a Duty, and I Execute My Duty’
July 31st, 2012Via: Lew Rockwell Blog:
One wonders if drone pilot Col. D. Scott Brenton listens to Louis Armstrong in the suburban Air National Guard Base in Syracuse from which he murders people 7,000 miles away.
“I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Brenton tells the New York Times. Drone operators see their intended targets “wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night,” explains Dave, another high-tech murderer who killed from an office cockpit at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base and who now trains new recruits to the cyber-killer corps at New Mexico’s Holloman Air Force Base.
When instructed to kill someone he has stalked from the air for a prolonged period, “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,” Brenton insists. I have a duty, and I execute my duty.” When the deed is done, he points out, nobody “in my immediate environment is aware of anything that has occurred.”
“There was a good reason for killing the people that I did, and I go through it in my head over and over and over,” insists another drone operator named Will, who — like Dave — served a deskbound “combat” tour at Creech and now trains others to do likewise at Holloman Air Base.
Like the soldier Bates in Henry V, it’s sufficient for Will — and others of his ilk — to render obedience to their Leader, confident that “if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.” The more concise and notorious formula, of course, is: We are only obeying orders. Besides, drone operators (who insist on being called “combat pilots”) are carrying out an indispensable function by picking off Afghan “militants” — or at least those “suspected” of such tendencies — who unreasonably resent the presence of foreign military personnel in their country.
The New York Times profile is part of a campaign by the state-aligned media to “humanize” the state functionaries who murder by remote control — and to normalize this mode of mass murder as drones become part of the domestic apparatus of surveillance, regimentation, and repression. Readers are invited to share the anguish of these conflicted people, who for reasons of duty have to do terrible but necessary things.
…
“It’s like a videogame,” one deskbound drone jockey told Singer. “It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s f****g cool.”
Research Credit: pookie
it ain’t just people that can be ‘boiled like frogs’, but ideas, notions, and concepts too, like honor.
http://www.alternet.org/world/why-people-cave-extremist-ideas-were-once-unthinkable?paging=off
“combat pilots” -that’s literally outrageous -and no one would be more outraged than a real combat pilot. just making such a claim is the ballsiest thing these drone jockeys do. besides making any claim to humanity, that is.
the real two-fold horror is 1) the global scale of it all -that there’s no external witness, no one outside this whole madness, and 2) the generational timescale of boiling us frogs; anyone born in 1980 (the Reagan era) is now 32. even i, born in 1954, cannot tell you firsthand too much about Eisenhower, or even Kennedy or before for that matter, much less anything outside the U.S. -and we are the last of the pre-internet generation. that matters, in ways that each day fewer can comprehend. it’s not just change in war, or governments, or law, or even culture (books & writing, painting & art, cinema & video, sports & competition), or even religion -but simple basic central concepts like honor. conscience. humanity.
it’s funny. i feel like saying i’m too old for this shit, but it’s precisely because i’m not young i have that added perspective. did my generation ever really say ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’? might it not now say ‘don’t trust anyone under 30’?
for the love of God, how can all those SOBs sleep at night? how?
that alternet article doesn’t say anything new particularly, but it definitely needed be restated. again and again and again. no matter how futilely. -i fear the future may hold no record. not even archive.org holding such sites and articles as this. our reality is worse than any hollywood movie ever, and stands to get much worse yet. how in the hell can current children be future-proofed?? there has simple got to be a way.
a long bilious rant, yes. sorry. but i ain’t editing out a word of it.
A lot of people will justify doing anything if it will put food on their family’s table, for example: police, soldiers, politicians, CIA, TSA, DEA, etc…..