Calling Out Drone War as a War Crime

Predator and Hellfire
(Image by (From Wikimedia) Brigadier Lance Mans, Deputy Director, NATO Special Operations Coordination Centre / http://ifpafletcher, Author: See Source)   Details   Source   DMCA

So it's very imprecise [...] and it in no way correlates to our own judicial look at what humanity is supposed to be doing to each other. There's no opportunity for that person to defend themselves, to offer evidence to say "Hey, you got the wrong person. Here's the evidence that shows that I didn't do anything that you are alleging." They don't have that chance at all. They are just blown away.

And people that are in the car with them, are in the house with them, the kids, the relatives, the mothers, the grandfathers are disappeared because our intelligence agency, which is not infallible, has made a mistake. So, those are things that concern me, as a former military, retired military, former State Department person.

We are using a weapons system [...] that doesn't equate at all to what we've always thought that our system was supposed to be doing. Which is to give everybody a chance to refute any charges the government comes up with.

DB: I'm wondering if this kind of piloting, if this kind of "remote control murder" by drones, as it has been labeled, has special impact on the people, especially the pilots [...] when they find out they just murdered, wiped out, a wedding party of innocents. I'm wondering if this has a special impact on the psyche, if there's a struggle here, going on at that level?

AW: I think there is. And we have heard from many pilots, and the two that will be speaking tonight were not actually pilots but they were a part of the whole process. One of them was a communications technician that put the communications links up so the drone pilots could be in communication with the incident analyst that might be a continent away.

But we know that the attrition rate on people associated with the drone program is very high. And that indicates that there's a moral component to this that people are evaluating in their own minds and consciousness and saying, "I don't want to do this anymore."

And so the attrition rate is high. The Air Force now trains more drone pilots than it does fixed wing air craft pilots. The incentive to sign up to be in the drone program is very high. Bonuses of $100,000 are not uncommon to get young men and women to join up with the drone program. And yet the attrition rate is very high. So it indicates there's a moral component here that the drone program probably is touching more than any other weapons system that we have.

DB: Finally, if you had sixty seconds with the President, what do you think you'd say?

AW: I would say, as a military officer with 29 years' experience, and a U.S. diplomat, that we have a weapons system that is causing blowback to the interests of the United States. Using the assassin program is making the United States more insecure rather than secure. That it is harming our national security, not enhancing it. And that we should stop this drone program. And he, as president of the United States, should stop being the sign-off person on this, because, in my opinion, it's illegal and he could be put up on war crimes charges. That's what I would tell him.