From: Open Channel
COMMENT - The highly psychopathic are very aware they can manipulate normal people, changing what they accept and decent, human, and normal. This happened with Enron, as we remember to our horror, and it is happening in the drone operators. The exception is this program includes individuals who are, themselves, highly psychopathic and enjoy the killing without limit.
Drone contractors have different motives, but the outcome is the same. Those who begin as 'normal' are personally impacted and their values and personal behavior altered.
Former drone operator Brandon Bryant tells NBC's Richard Engel that he felt like he became a "heartless" "sociopath" under the drone program.
A former Air Force drone operator who says he participated in missions that killed more than 1,600 people remembers watching one of the first victims bleed to death.
“The guy that was running forward, he’s missing his right leg,” he recalled. “And I watch this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot.” As the man died his body grew cold, said Bryant, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as the ground.Brandon Bryant says he was sitting in a chair at a Nevada Air Force base operating the camera when his team fired two missiles from their drone at three men walking down a road halfway around the world in Afghanistan. The missiles hit all three targets, and Bryant says he could see the aftermath on his computer screen – including thermal images of a growing puddle of hot blood.
“I can see every little pixel,” said Bryant, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, “if I just close my eyes.”
Bryant, now 27, served as a drone sensor operator from 2006 to 2011, at bases in Nevada, New Mexico and in Iraq, guiding unmanned drones over Iraq and Afghanistan. Though he didn't fire missiles himself he took part in missions that he was told led to the deaths of an estimated 1,626 individuals.
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