The Drone War has reached whole new levels of insanity
One of the first things Trump did as president was to loosen the rules on drone strikes, "even if it means tolerating more civilian casualties".
Just over a month later the headline was: Civilian deaths from US-led airstrikes hit record high under Donald Trump
Horrific and disgusting, but a far cry from being a surprise.
This much you probably already know.
The part you may not know is the insanity that is happening on the other side of the drone strike.
First I want to take a step back.
Recall that drone operators are suffering from PTSD at a rate higher than actual pilots.
I don't have to say why.
Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant's digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.
"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.
Eventually the sanitized horror of this global assassination program takes its toll.
So many drone pilots and drone operators were quitting that in 2015 the Air Force had to cut back on the number of drone flights.
The Air Force also has tried to ease the stress by creating a human performance team, led by a psychologist and including doctors and chaplains who have been granted top-secret clearances so they can meet with pilots and camera operators anywhere in the facility if they are troubled.
If you need a whole team of psychologists, doctors and chaplains, then something is seriously wrong with what you are doing.
Has that occurred to anyone?
“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.”
- Michael Haas, a former senior airman
Despite employing an entire army of psychologists, doctors and chaplains, one year after cutting back on the number of drone strikes, the Air Force gave up and started employing mercenaries.
The number and identities of contractors working on the drone flights are considered classified information, the Air Force said. But Pentagon officials said there are at least several hundred contractors, many of them former drone or fighter pilots who are making double or triple their military salaries.
“This is opening up a whole new can of worms — we have seen problems with security contractors on the battlefield since 9/11, and there’s been an improvement in oversight in that area, but that came after a decade of problems,” said Laura A. Dickinson, a law professor at George Washington University, who has written extensively about the United States’ use of military contractors. “With drones, this is a new area where we already do not have a lot of transparency, and with contractors operating drones there’s no clearly defined regime of oversight and accountability.”
Meanwhile, the Air Force continues to mess up the brains of these kids.
In fact, the kids flying these drone killing machines are getting so f*cked up in the head that...well, you have to read it to believe it.
In a report reminiscent of science fiction, U.S. Air Force scientists said this week that sending electric pulses to soldier's brains is an effective technique to improve attention span and cognitive ability.
The as-yet unregulated technology may be used on drone operators, whose role in the United States' secret assassination program leaves them with some of the military's highest rates of burn-out.
Yes. The drone operators have defective brains from pushing buttons to kill kids all day, so let's zap their brains to fix them.
That sounds like military intelligence.
Holy F*ck. Where is Doctor Strangelove? Is he behind the curtain?
We must have reached Peak Crazy.
Comments
Running out of bombs
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Looks like they need to test for psychopathy
"How many of your neighbor's pets have you tortured and killed when you were younger? Did you enjoy doing it?"
It's amazing how little discussion there is , like zero,
regarding the seeming utter ineffectiveness and failure of the mighty U.S./NATO military machine to make progress in their war OF terror. A thinking person might wonder what is wrong that a military of such size with such resources after spending trillions of dollars still needs more bombs, more soldiers, more everything to try to defeat an adversary which numbers in the tens of thousands.
They don't want to win this war or terror
it makes the defense companies, the banks and the others who profit from the wars rich.
And as usual, those industries fund and supply both sides of the wars and they created the people that we are fighting against in some countries and fighting alongside in others
As you said, there is something very wrong when the people who pilot the drones need medications, priests, doctors or their brains interfered with so they can continue to do what their conscious is telling them it's wrong to do.
There was a reason why the military created many of the video games. They desensitize people from an early age so that they can grow up and become drone operators. And if their conscious gets in the way they can have their brains zapped and they can continue eliminating anyone in who is in the areas of where they drop the bombs.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
@snoopydawg
I tend to play a lot of video games, and it is one thing that all gamers know, the games are NOT real, so it is okay to kill pixelated targets that resemble people, because they are not real. the only players who are desensitized to possible killing of humans they have actually found are those with anti-social disorders such as sociopathic and psychopathic types. Most of the gamer types that have been used by the airforce actually know the difference, and that this is messing with their heads is a sign that these were the kids who knew the difference between video games to real life, and hence it is hurting their morale knowing they killed actual people, not pixels.The trouble will be when they convince in virtual or via signals that the targets are some form of monsters, then we may see less issues on the guilt trips of folks who are thinking they are killing infected monstrosities, or aliens even. That may actually happen one day, or they will make the killer robots which will have no issues destroying a target.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
I think it's amazing too
Back in the days, losing wars for the ruler meant losing your head.
Now no one seems to care.
This is my problem with Yale psychiatrists saying Trump is crazy
When did Yale — home of Skull and Bones and neocon history professors, and integral part of the personnel pipeline for the CIA and Washington lobbyist and law firms — ever say the country’s foreign policy elite as a whole is crazy?
The Deep State is psychopaths all the way down. And it looks like nothing short of a defeat and downfall, on a scale dwarfing that of the Third Reich, will stop them.
Thanks, gjohnsit.
Awesome work...as usual.
Normalization
Recently read about the concentration camp guards in Nazi Germany saying that the rulers have to find a way to 'normalize' what is happening and the Nazis certainly found the people they needed to make industrialized murder 'normal'.
The Air Force is doing the same thing, getting rid of anyone with a conscience while they find their own 'normalized' sociopathic murderers.
...the United States is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" and "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
Rev. Martin Luther King
What would Reverend King have thought of the Bush, Obama, Trump world? I think we know.
Dear Dems: You lost the WH, Senate, House, dozens of governors, state level SOS and AG and about 1,000 state legislative seats. Maybe...you're doing something wrong.
It's only a matter of time
Reapers will be used here. We already target American citizens ( Anwar al Alicki and his children).
Local PD already have and use small weaponized drones that dispense pepper spray and gas.
Tracking your kids with a cel phone app can and will become their targeting system of choice, as we already know through wikileaks they can hijack our phones at will. If you are an outspoken dissident of the PTB, leave your cel phone in your car at night parked out on the street for your own safety.
It's only a matter of time.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
@earthling1
The mentally ill ex-soldier shooting people in Texas at a BLM rally, the police used a drone to eliminate him, not use a psychology expert to deal with him, so the killer drones have been tested already.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
Wish I saw this before
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