They sit in rooms resembling hi-tech shipping containers. Joysticks in hand, they spend hours watching grainy screens, displaying people in faraway lands going about their daily lives — and they hold life and death in their hands.
They are the men and women who operate the United States’ controversial drone warfare program — and they frequently get it disastrously wrong.
A newly-released report by the Associated Press claims that one third of people killed by US drones in Yemen this year were civilians with no association to terror groups like Al-Qaeda, the intended targets.
But intention and reality often diverge sharply when it comes to death by US drones — and the horror is not confined to Yemen. From Pakistan to Afghanistan, to Iraq, Syria and Somalia, US drone strikes — which are often hailed by the US military and government as “precise” and even “surgical” — have killed scores of innocent civilians.
In recent years, multiple whistleblowers — former drone technicians, camera operators and image analysts — have come forward to shed light on the horror and reality of what US drone bombing really entails. Perhaps an indicator of the level of stress involved, the people who do these jobs also quit them in record numbers. In 2015, an internal Air Force memo published by the Daily Beast revealed that there was a serious “outflow” problem with drone pilots due to the “unrelenting pace of operations.” Even when the Air Force began to offer six-figure salaries, it did not stem the outflow from the program.
Against the State: An …
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But long, arduous shifts and high pressure are just…