“Horrible & Numbing”: Chilling Testimony From U.S. Air Force Drone Operator On His First Kill
by Arjun Walia. http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/11/24/horrible-numbing-chilling-testimony-from-u-s-air-force-drone-operator-on-his-first-kill/
Former Air Force pilot Brandon Bryan is one of the first ever United States drone operators to speak out against what has been happening overseas for a number of years now, which is the murder of countless innocent lives. Bryan served as a sensor operator for what’s known as the “Predator program” from 2007 to 20011. He was responsbile for manning the camera on the unmanned aerial vehicles that carried out attacks overseas before leaving active duty in the Air Force, and, as Democracy Now reports, was actually given a certificate that credited his squadron for more than 1,500 kills.
The US clearly encourages and rewards this type of activity. Think about that while you consider what is still happening around the world, including in Syria.
Below is Bryant’s recounting of his first-ever lethal drone strike and the impact it continues to have on him to this day:
I didn’t really understand what it meant to kill at first. It was horrible. The first time was horrible, the second time was horrible, the third time was numbing, the fourth time was numbing, but of course the first time sticks with you the longest.
The Ones Pulling The Triggers & Giving The Orders Need To Stop
Kudos to Bryan for doing his part to shed more light on the atrocities being committed overseas. It really hits home a specific message, and a specific solution. That solution is for the human beings giving these orders and the the human beings following these orders to stop listening. If we want this mess to stop, a shift in thinking needs to take place. We are being used as tools. But just imagine what would happen if every human being on the planet refused to participate in war. What would our world look like then? While you could make the argument that intelligent robotic aircraft would take over, that still begs the question, who is making this aircraft? At the end of the day, there is a human being behind these killings. We are the cause, and at the same time we are the solution.
This is why we say change needs to come from within, and as more soldiers wake up to the truth about these wars, I have to believe that more of them will put down their weapons.
Shooting For No Reason
Brandon Bryan is not the only solider to speak out about this issue. Ethan McCord, a US soldier who served in Iraq, has revealed some disturbing truths about the life of a soldier in the Wikileaks video “Collateral Damage.”
In the video above, Bryan describes how the civilians being killed are seemingly indiscriminately labelled as dangerous, even though clearly they are not.
“So we’re looking at this thing, these people, and uh, it was like, almost instantaneous that someone was like, ‘confirmed weapons … you’re cleared hot.’ “
Ethan McCord expresses the same thing in the video below:
“If you feel threatened by anybody you’re able to engage that person. Many soldiers felt threatened just by the fact that you were looking at them, so they fired their weapons on anybody who was looking at them because ‘I felt threatened.’ We were told that if we were to fire our weapons at people, and we were to be investigated, ‘officers would take care of you.’ “
“This happens on a daily basis. I’ve watched … [the destruction of] vans full of children who were in the way when an IUD went off. The destruction of the Iraqi people happens on a daily basis.”
Brainwashing Young Soldiers
When a person signs up to supposedly ‘serve their country,’ they are most likely doing so with the best of intentions. They believe they are making a positive impact on the world, defending their country from radical terrorists. Many of these soldiers are completely unaware of truth behind the global war on terrorism and the so-called enemy they are going after.
“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.” — Former British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook
This is precisely why a number of professors, politicians, and experts from around the world recently gathered to warn us about the global agenda being enacted by the Western military alliance.
The global war on terrorism is a US undertaking, which is fake, it’s based on fake premises. It tells us that somehow America and the Western world are going after a fictitious enemy, the Islamic state, when in fact the Islamic state is fully supported and financed by the Western military alliance and America’s allies in the Persian Gulf. . . . They say Muslims are terrorists, but it just so happens that terrorists are Made in America. They’re not the product of Muslim society, and that should be abundantly clear to everyone on this floor. . . . The global war on terrorism is a fabrication, a big lie and a crime against humanity.” (source) (source)
If you believe that these terrorists are being funded and armed by the United States and other governments (along with the hand that controls them all, which is comprised of the major banks), then you need to ask yourself why. What is the logical explanation for such illogical actions? It seems clear that they wish to incite panic and fear to distract us from the reality that they are fabricating these events — all in order to justify the infiltration of other countries for their own, selfish motives. And this is something that more soldiers, and everyday citizens, need to realize.
Are soldiers really fighting for freedom, or are they fighting for elitist agendas under the guise of patriotism and a global terrorist threat? Patriotism is propaganda, and when combined with the fictitious, manufactured, terrorist threat, it makes one believe that there is something to defend, something to fight for.
In his paper “Consent Without Consent: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Democracy,” Noam Chomsky quotes and adds to some important revelations by Edward Bernays:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” To carry out this essential task, “the intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and systematically,” because they alone “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and can “pull the wires which control the public mind.” Therefore, our “society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda,” another case of “consent without consent.” Propaganda provides the leadership with a mechanism “to mold the mind of the masses” so that “they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction.” The leadership can “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.” This process of “engineering consent” is the very “essence of the democratic process.”
There is also the pressure these soldiers face when they are in the military. They have no choice but to take orders from other brainwashed (I do not mean for this term to have a negative connotation here, we are all brainwashed to some extent) soldiers who outrank them.
Just as Ethan McCord stated in the Wikileaks video above:
“We were told by our battalion commander to kill every m***** f****** on the street. Many soldiers would not do that. We decided we were going to shoot into the rooftops of buildings because if you didn’t fire, the NCOs in your platoon would make your life hell.”
