Conscience and Remote-Controlled Killing.

Killing foreigners has always been part of the Human Condition. Our 'fear' of interlopers is well established and while in many instances may be irrational and prejudiced, it is all too often justified.

Today is St Crispin's Day. Let us consider War. And Honour.

Considering  'dark' matters has to be done, even in a Tavern.  It has been pointed out by those close to me that this account of the goings on in the Tavern often deals with unsavoury matters. The world is complex with much 'dark' to contrast with the light of Goodness and many people who cannot tell the difference.

There is Ying and Yang people. Good and Bad. You can walk a fine line between them but we are apt to fall one side of that line or the other.  Make sure you know what you fall into.

Chimpanzees will patrol their territory and kill any monkey that they find, often eating the poor sod too. They do not 'fear' monkeys: they hate them. It is in their genes. And we are very closely related to Chimps, so we are told. Something we have learned by close observation and biological sciences.

Indeed the main difference between humans and chimps is largely confined to the male chromosome, the 'Y' that feminists hate so much. We have learned that too. Fine haters, feminists: its the Chimp in them. Men seem more finely human, discriminating more carefully.

That's another hatred of feminists: they do not want anyone to discriminate.

To them, Good and Bad are just 'relative'. Discrimination though is always 'Bad'. Odd how good an bad matters 'relatively' too.

Armies do not like their troops to discriminate too much either, despite the overarching message of the Nuremburg Trials. "Obey" is far easier to teach than, "use your Conscience". It is especially easy with young men brought up in the awful, mind-denying education system so Dominated as it is with those caring, nurturing, conflict-resolving psychos we call teachers.

An education system that produced Brandon Bryant.

He may well have been a nice young man. He certainly retained some vestige of conscience despite the massive pressures of an anti-boy schooling and a thuggery Military. But it was not enough to have him say 'NO' to what seemed to be 'Lawful Orders'.

As a soldier his orders from above were to Kill people: the enemies of the State. Heck, as a Knight I can understand that. On a wall in the Tavern hangs a Commission from Her Majesty the Queen, addressing me as her 'Trusty and Well Beloved' and authorising me to go forth and kill her enemies. I did rather well.

Fortunately I was also mentored by strong men with a conscience still very much in fine working order. They taught me to pray over the slain; not to hate them. My enemies were close and shooting at me. Killing was a survival issue.

Brandon was in a far more 'technical' force, able to kill people thousands of miles away.

Retired US drone operator tells of the turmoil he feels after killing by remote control 

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/retired-us-drone-operator-tells-of-the-turmoil-he-feels-after-killing-by-remote-control/story-fni0xs61-1226746447041
 

"I WATCHED him die. It took a long time."  

These are the chilling words of a retired US drone operator, describing his actions in Afghanistan. 

The former US air force drone controller told GQ how he is haunted by the horror of killing people thousands of miles away as he sat in safety in a US command bunker.

Airman First Class Brandon Bryant, who spoke out in a bid to raise public awareness, describes a string of disturbing incidents - including being told to cover up his fears that a child had been killed, after photo checks showed the blurry body could have been a dog.

He tells of one incident in detail - beginning when he took over control of a MQ-1B Predator drone's weapons systems as it circled quietly miles above the Afghan countryside.

Bryant himself sat in a padded chair in a darkened booth in the Nevada desert, lit only by the big-screen monitors on which the following scenes unfolded. Alongside him sat the drone's pilot. 

 Matthew Power tells us:

Confessions of a Drone Warrior 

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination#ixzz2ihrbqIFX 

He was an experiment, really. One of the first recruits for a new kind of warfare in which men and machines merge. He flew multiple missions, but he never left his computer. He hunted top terrorists, saved lives, but always from afar. He stalked and killed countless people, but could not always tell you precisely what he was hitting.  

Meet the 21st-century American killing machine, who is still utterly, terrifyingly human.

Now, before we go on, let me make something clear. Personally.

I am not 'against' war, just as I am not 'against' any tragedy. I have great and careful sympathy with all human beings in this vale of tears we call Life.

The drive to the development of our technologies is also written into our genes.  I am not against Drones, nor their useful deployment. There have always been people, regimes, wickedness that we must resist, fight, destroy. That means we have to do many unsavoury things. With clever technologies.

But as Human Beings, with a Soul, with Conscience, we are Individually accountable.

While Bryant considers leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for their principles, he’s cautious about discussing some of the details to which his top-secret clearance gave him access.  

Still, he is a curtain drawn back on the program that has killed thousands on our behalf.

For Bryant, talking about them has become a     

sort of confessional catharsis,  

a means of processing the things he saw and did during his six years in the Air Force as an experimental test subject in an utterly new form of warfare. 

But it is not enough. A 'sort of confessional' does not heal the Soul.

Only the Sacrament of a True Confession, to God, in-front of a Priest, can do that.

But Obama recently even tried to forbid priests to give the Sacraments to Soldiers like Brandon.

Evil tries every crack in a man's armour.

Read More http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201311/drone-uav-pilot-assassination#ixzz2ihrbqIFX

Bryant was tracking three men walking down a dusty dirt track.
He instructed the drone's cameras to zoom in an effort to pick out the finer details of the suspects. He was told they were carrying rifles, but from that height he could not tell weapons apart from a simple shepherd's staff.

Then came a tinny, remote command in his headset: "Shoot."

IR mode: Check.

Laser designator: Check.

Countdown: Three ... two... one.. "Missile off the rail".

The $95,000 Hellfire missile leapt from underneath the Predator drone, powering up to supersonic speeds in seconds as it plunged towards its unsuspecting targets.

The operator watched. The men walked on, unaware.

The IR cameras lit up with flame.

Bright. Silent.

"The smoke clears, and there's pieces of the two guys around the crater," he told GQ.

"And there's this guy over here, and he's missing his right leg above his knee. He's holding it, and he's rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it's hitting the ground, and it's hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same colour as the ground he was lying on."
 

Now, Bryant is speaking out in an effort to raise awareness of the cold killings drone operators such as himself are expected to conduct.

He says he regards leakers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden to be heroes for standing up for their principles. 

But Bryant himself will not discuss the details of his job which were classified "top secret".

Bryant's testimony has added fuels to the flames of controversy surrounding the United State's  drone wars.

The administration insists that operations intended to kill top terror leaders -  which can take drones deep inside the airspace of nations unaware of their presence - are legal under international law.

Amnesty International disputes this, earlier this week declaring such actions amount to "war crimes".

At this point one smells a rat so follow it up through the main links.

Amnesty is often taken as a 'sound' organisation of 'good' people, but was started by a British Communist Party Cell in London pre-WW2 and funded by Comintern. It propagandised for the Communists imprisoned during the Spanish Civil War but ignored the equally ill-treated Republican prisoners. It remains consistent in its mendacity, pretending to be fair-minded, but rarely does it criticise the Left.

Amnesty lives in a ménage a trois with Feminists and Cultural Marxists and is frequently seen around with other unsavoury leftists on the side extolling same-sex marriage, abortion and euthanasia. Frankly they have supported far more murders than a drone operator.

One has to pull a fresh pint whenever they have sent a glass sliding down the bar and into someone's lap.

Pakistan. Yemen. Afghanistan. All have experienced drone over-flights intended to find and kill those the US assert are a threat to its security.

The US has carried out nearly 400 drone attacks in Pakistan's restive tribal districts along the Afghan border since 2004, killing between 2500 and 3600 people, according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Even in his climate controlled bunker, Bryant felt the impact of the wars raging thousands of kilometres away.

In Iraq, he was tasked with following an insurgent commander through his electronic eye-in-the-sky.

The suspect pulled over and dragged two girls out of his car.

"They were bound and gagged," says Bryant. "He put them down on their knees, executed them in the middle of the street, and left them there. People just watched it and didn't do anything."
 

Nor did Bryant. The order did not come, this time.

Many of his tasks he regarded as vital, such as supporting troops in the field. Others, he agreed, were necessary.

"We were going after top dudes. They started showing us PowerPoint presentations on who these people (we were targeting) are," he said. "Why we're after him, and what he did. I liked that. I liked being able to know shit like that."

But there were also incidents which made him doubt the role of his winged robotic killers.

He related one such incident: 

"Missile off the rail.. (then) this figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person." 

The intelligence operative overseeing the mission reported the victim in his official statement as being a dog.

The operators themselves became little better than the machines they operate, he said, frequently slipping into an emotional "zombie mode". 

Bryant was not immune, sitting in safety thousands of killometres from the scenes of destruction he initiated.

He has been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. 

It is an affliction common to many ex-US military drone operators.
Now, the US Air Force cannot get enough volunteers to man them. 

Dirty. Dull. These are the key words that fill the minds of those approached to take on the task.

For a pilot, nothing matches the thrill of air beneath one's own wings.  

For a weapons operator, the fear is burnout after round-the-clock shifts sitting behind flickering monitors - striving to make sense of what is going on half a world away.

And they know what they do is controversial.

Regardless, US officials reject any and all criticism of the drone program: To not attack "terrorists" this way would be tantamount to inviting more attacks on the mainland United States, they say.

The Issue is not the controversiality, but the lack of conscience.

Young men such as Brandon are sat in a machine which gives then vast amounts of information but much of which is redundant and irrelevant. It does not identify individuals.

He is ordered to kill people who are not shooting at him. Indeed not shooting at anyone.

Yet, as we see, when he does get 'true', incontrovertible information, actually seeing an execution of innocents, no 'Order' come to tell him to intervene.

A Man must follow his Conscience FIRST.

His Conscience MUST have precedence over 'orders'.

St Augustine made it clear 1400 years ago and there has been enough time passed for everyone to know it and to have grasped it.

A Man of Good Conscience MUST DISOBEY any human authority that instructs him to do 'Bad'.

 

 

That is assuming that the education he has been given in his youth has taught him anything.

 

But  Cultural Marxists and Feminist Chimps dominate education.

 

War has always taken young men to its filthy bosom. Young men are all-too-easily swayed. Cannon Fodder. Expendable.

 

Not just their bodies, blasted to bits on some foreign field, but now we can kill at a distance with their bodies safe, we are still happy to blast their Souls to Hell.

 

 

God for Harry and St Crispin. Help us all to do it Right.

 

 

Pax Dei Vobiscum.