For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.Source: Information Clearing House
Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.
With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.
Second zero was the moment in which Bryant's digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.
"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.
"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?
Bryant is no longer with the Air Force and is living in Montana, trying to recover from his conscience being racked by the thought of all the murders he committed.
At least there are some Americans who still have a conscience.
Where do these hunter-killer units operate from?
One place is Cannon Air Force Base, a United States Air Force Base, located approximately 7 miles (11 km) southwest of Clovis, New Mexico. It is under the jurisdiction of Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC).
The weirdness factor here is that Cannon is located close to Roswell, NM, home of the 1947 crash of an ET space craft.
Another location is Creech Air Force Base, formerly known as Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field, is a United States Air Force base located in Clark County, Nevada, United States.
The weirdness factor here is that Creech is located close to Area 51, notorious for various government 'black budget' programs which remain off the radar of everyone, including Congress.
For a map of current and future drone base locations, click here to see where 64 of these death dealers are located... opens to a PDF file.
Drones with nefarious sounding names like Global Hawk; Hunter; Predator; Puma-AE; Raven; Shadow; Scan Eagle; Tiger Moth; Viking 300; Wasp; Warrior.
Why does the government need 64 locations in the States to fly these death machines?
And are there more than 64 locations?
Drones are flying over American skies, spying on you
Mr.
Is America Like Adam Lanza? U.S. Drone Strikes Have Killed 176 Children in Pakistan AloneMadeleine Albright - The deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it.
U.S. drones are killing children and terrorizing families abroad. Earlier this year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 176 children have been murdered in Pakistan alone. And along with drone attacks, an average of 4.8 children are killed per day in Afghanistan where earlier this year, a U.S. sergeant is reported to have killed 9 children. Will these murders be deemed worthy of our thoughts and prayers, or even our news headlines?
These deaths abroad are tragic too. These deaths will also affect the loved ones of victims for years to come and their lives are no less-worthy of thoughts, prayers and government (or civilian) action.
Some will disagree with me and say that we should care about the deaths of children in the U.S. to a greater extent than the deaths of those abroad, because children living here are part of our nation. But most of us don't know the loved ones of the deceased in Connecticut any better than we know deceased in other countries. With all men (and children) created equal, we as Americans should care when any child is killed, not just the ones who happen to be born in a certain geographical region called the United States.
A forklift operator is the person responsible for piloting hydraulic lifting systems of heavy transport materials such as industrial trucks. The usual employers of these operators are warehouse establishments and docks. As noted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean forklift operator salary in the country is $31,500 every year. Forklift Operator Wage
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