That moment for a Drone operator.

Todd Purdum reported in Vanity Fair that Dick Cheney would travel to the White House with a biohazard suit within arm’s reach. General Stanley McChrystal likened the flow of intelligence about terrorist threats to ‘a stream of hot cinders … falling everywhere around us, and we had to see them, catch those we could, and react instantly to those we had missed that were starting to set the ground on fire’


A former drone operator published an account of his experience in Der Spiegel:

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. ‘Was that a kid?’ they wrote into a chat window on the monitor. Then, someone they didn’t know answered … ‘No. That was a dog.’

Living under Drones, a 2012 report assembled from information gathered at law clinics at Stanford and NYU, documents the trauma inflicted on Pakistani civilians by the continuous buzzing of drone engines overhead:

Interviewees described emotional breakdowns, running indoors or hiding when drones appear above, fainting, nightmares and other intrusive thoughts, hyper-startled reactions to loud noises, outbursts of anger or irritability and loss of appetite and other physical symptoms … A father of three said: ‘Drones are always on my mind. It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them, you know they are there.’

Recent Congressional testimony by Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni writer, supports Scahill’s argument: ‘What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now intense anger and growing hatred of America.’

‘If there’s one person they’re going after and there’s 34 people in the building, 35 people are going to die,’ a source in US military intelligence told Scahill.

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