After Barack Obama joined the rest of us in mourning the slaughter of innocent children in Newtown, Conn., Sanford Berman, a Minnesota civil liberties activist, wrote me: "Obama’s tears for the dead Connecticut kids made me sick. What about weeping over the 400 or more children he killed with drone strikes?"
Indeed, our president has shown no palpable concern over those deaths, but a number of U.S. personnel — not only the CIA agents engaged in drone killings — are deeply troubled.
Peggy Noonan reports that David E. Sanger, in his book "Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power," discovered that "some of those who operate the unmanned bombers are getting upset. They track victims for days. They watch them play with their children." Then what happens: "’It freaks you out’" ("Who Benefits From the ‘Avalanche of Leaks’?" Wall Street Journal, June 15).
For another example, I introduce you to Conor Friedersdorf and his account of "The Guilty Conscience of a Drone Pilot Who Killed a Child" (theatlantic.com, Dec. 19).
The subtitle: "May his story remind us that U.S. strikes have reportedly killed many times more kids than died in Newtown — and that we can do better."The story Friedersdorf highlights in the Atlantic first appeared in Germany’s Der Spiegel about an Air Force officer (not CIA) who "lamented the fact that he sometimes had to kill ‘good daddies’" … (and) "even attended their funerals" from far away.And dig this, President Obama: "as a consequence of the job, he collapsed with stress-induced exhaustion and developed PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)." Yet these drones, "Hellfire missiles," are President Obama’s favorite extra-judicial weapons against suspected terrorists.
Getting back to the Air Force officer, Brandon Bryant, with the guilty conscience. Friedersdorf’s story quotes extensively from Der Spiegel’s article, which recalls that, when Bryant got the order to fire, "he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof (of a shed) with a laser.
The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact …
"With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds …
"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.
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