Important perspective from Heather Linebaugh, an American who is a former Unmanned Ariel Vehicle (aka drone) analyst in the US Air Force, writing in The Guardian:
We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life all because of a bad image or angle.
Armed Predator drone firing Hellfire missile (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Not only people on the ground are changed by the drone program. Exposed to video of drone kills day after day, Linebaugh now lives with the uncertainty of what her role really was:
I know the feeling you experience when you see someone die. Horrifying barely covers it. And when you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience. UAV troops are victim to not only the haunting memories of this work that they carry with them, but also the guilt of always being a little unsure of how accurate their confirmations of weapons or identification of hostile individuals were.
Here is Linebaugh speaking at an anti-war rally earlier in the year:
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