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Thursday, February 25, 2016

Remote control combat

The Untold Casualties of the Drone War

Early one evening in November, Brandon Bryant, a former Air Force officer and perhaps the world's most famous drone program whistleblower, sits on the sofa in a Manhattan hotel suite, writing a letter to President Obama. A grey hoodie is pulled over his baseball cap, the sleeves half-covering a red dragon and Nordic tribal tattoos on his arms and hands. For three years, he's spoken critically about his time flying drone missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — where he helped kill 1,626 people, according to his own performance review — but now he can't seem to find the right words. Between sips of water and occasional requests for feedback, Bryant furiously crosses out lines in the notebook he typically uses to write poetry. "I don't want it to sound too formal," he says. "It needs to read like it's coming from us and not from our lawyers."

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