Imagine a job where you sit in front of a computer monitor, toggling a joystick that controls a drone, watching a family 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. You’re watching mothers and fathers with their children, children playing soccer; you watch them wake up in the morning, do their work, visit with their neighbors, and go to sleep at night. Then one day when mom and the kids go off to market, the order comes to obliterate dad with a missile from high overhead. “Dad,” of course, is a “suspected militant,” which means he may or may not be a Taliban fighter, and that is all the justification needed to kill him.
At the end of the day, adrenaline still high, you leave the video screen and commute home past suburban fast-food restaurants and convenience stores to help your kids with their homework.
That’s the condensed version of a story Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times recently wrote about the pilots who fly drones over Afghanistan from Hancock Field Air National Guard Base near Syracuse, N.Y. Given the title, “A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away,” it explores the lives and emotions of drone pilots. One pilot told the Times, “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy. I have a duty, and I execute the duty.”
A similar story in today’s Guardian quoted a pilot who flew drone missions from Creech air force base outside Las Vegas as saying, "On the drive home I would decompress. Listen to music, take a deep breath, compartmentalise so I could make the transition to husband, father, family man." Another pilot, when asked about criticism that drone strikes are extrajudicial executions, answered, "That's for the politicians to consider. We follow the orders of our civilian leaders."
Both remind me of a phrase coined by political philosopher Hannah Arendt – “the banality of evil.” She used it to refer to ordinary people who could commit crimes by accepting what they were told by their superiors, by an ideology, by a state. Evil actions do not require evil or depraved persons.
In this case, ordinary U.S. Air Force and CIA pilots, sitting comfortably in New York and Nevada, can carefully watch a family for days in the most intimate situations, then cold-bloodedly kill before going home for dinner. Just another day at the office, dear.
Duane Shank is Senior Policy Adviser for Sojourners.
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