Drone Pilots have Bank Accounts and Credit Cards
Frozen by Feds for Exposing US Murder
By William N. Grigg
November 27, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "TheFreeThoughtProject"
- For having the courage to come forward and expose the drone
program for the indiscriminate murder that it is, 4 vets are under
attack from the government they once served.
The U.S. Government failed to deter them
through threats of criminal prosecution, and
clumsy attempts to intimidate their families. Now four former
Air Force drone operators-turned-whistleblowers
have had their credit cards and bank accounts frozen, according
to human rights attorney Jesselyn Radack.
“My drone operators went public this week and now
their credit cards and bank accounts are frozen,”
Radack lamented on her Twitter feed (the spelling of her post
has been conventionalized). This was done despite the fact that none
of them has been charged with a criminal offense – but this is a
trivial formality in the increasingly Sovietesque American National
Security State.
Michael Haas, Brandon Bryant, Cian Westmoreland
and Stephen Lewis, who served as drone operators in the US Air
Force,
have gone public with detailed accounts of the widespread corruption
and institutionalized indifference to civilian casualties that
characterize the program. Some of those disclosures were made in
the recent documentary Drone; additional details have been provided
in
an open letter from the whistleblowers to President Obama,
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and CIA Director John Brennan.
“We are former Air Force service members,”
the letter begins. We joined the Air Force to protect American
lives and to protect our Constitution. We came to the realization
that the innocent civilians we were killing only fueled the feelings
of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like ISIS, while also
serving as a fundamental recruiting tool similar to Guantanamo Bay.
This administration and its predecessors have built a drone program
that is one of the most devastating driving forces for terrorism and
destabilization around the world.”
Elsewhere the former drone operators
have described how their colleagues dismissed children as
“fun-sized terrorists” and compared killing them to “cutting the
grass before it grows too long.” Children who live in countries
targeted by the drone program are in a state of constant terror,
according to Westmoreland: “There are 15-year-olds growing up who
have not lived a day without drones overhead, but you also have
expats who are watching what’s going on in their home countries and
seeing regularly the violations that are happening there, and that
is something that could radicalize them.”
By reliable estimates, ninety percent of those
killed in drone strikes are entirely harmless people, making the
program a singularly effective method of producing anti-American
terrorism. “We kill four and create ten,” Bryant said during a
November 19
press conference, referring to potential terrorists. “If you
kill someone’s father, uncle or brother who had nothing to do with
anything, their families are going to want revenge.”
Haas explained that the institutional culture of
the drone program emphasized and encouraged the dehumanization of
the targeted populations. “There was a much more detached outlook
about who these people were we were monitoring,” he recalled.
“Shooting was something to be lauded and something we should strive
for.”
Unable to repress his conscience or choke down his
moral disgust, Haas took refuge in alcohol and drug abuse, which he
says is predictably commonplace among drone operators. At least a
half-dozen members of his unit were using bath salts and could be
found “impaired” while on duty, Haas testifies.
Among the burdens Bryant now bears is the
knowledge that he participated in the mission that killed a fellow
U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki. Identified as a radical cleric and
accused of offering material support for al-Qaeda, al-Awlaki was
executed by a drone strike in Yemen. His 16-year-old son,
Abdulrahman, was killed in a separate drone strike a few weeks later
while sitting down to dinner at the home of a family friend. Asked
about the killing of a native-born U.S. citizen – who, at age 16,
was legally still a child – former
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs appeared to justify that
act by blaming it on the irresponsibility of the innocent child’s
father.
As Bryant points out, as a matter of law the elder
al-Awlaki was innocent, as well.
“We were told that al-Awlaki deserved to die, he
deserved to be killed as a traitor, but article 3 of section 2 of
the U.S. Constitution states that even a traitor deserves a fair
trial in front of a jury of his peers,” Bryant notes, lamenting that
his role in the “targeted killing” of a U.S. citizen without a trial
was a violation of his constitutional oath.
Investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill has
produced evidence suggesting that the White House-approved killing
of Anwar al-Awlaki’s son may have been carried out as retaliation
against the family for refusing to cooperate in the search for the
cleric. There are indications that the government has tried to
intimidate the whistleblowers by intimidating their families.
In October, while Brandon
Bryant was preparing to testify about the drone program before a
German parliamentary committee,
his mother LanAnn received a visit in her Missoula, Montana home
from two representatives of the Air Force’s Office of Special
Investigations. The men claimed that her personal information
was in the hands of the Islamic State, which had placed her name on
a “hit list.” She was also told not to share that disclosure with
anyone – a directive she promptly ignored by informing Ms. Radack,
who represents Brandon and the other whistleblowers.
According to Radack, a very similar episode
occurred last March in which the stepparent of another whistleblower
received a nearly identical visit from agents of the Air Force OSI.
“This is the US government wasting taxpayer dollars trying to
silence, intimidate and shut up people. It’s a very amateurish way
to shut up a whistleblower … by intimidating and scaring their
parents. This would be laughable if it weren’t so frightening.”
Given the role played by the U.S. government in
fomenting, equipping, and abetting the growth of ISIS, such warnings
have to be perceived as credible, albeit, indirect death threats.
