america's military might and its foreign policy exist separately from one another the us is a formidable military power but sadly its weak foreign policy was that is why i'm not inclined to suspect the obama administration of pursuing some secret plan to directed against iran. my name is brandon bryant i'm twenty seven year old better in born here born in the zoo. i was very much an introvert growing up single mother two sisters. of female cousins. so i was pretty much alone all the time and i grew up with books and comic books and heroes in villa and i kind of

grew up optimistic idealistic. i grew up in a christian home i wasn't necessarily to patriotic i was more of the fact. good guys vs bad guys making decisions and doing the right thing i decided to get in the air force. because. i was racking up college debt and i didn't know what else to do so when i was talking to the air force recruiter is like. you know those guys that sit in the operations center for james bond and gather the intelligence he needs to do his mission and i was like yeah i know those guys like a q. and all them and he's like yeah you'll be one of those guys and i was like it's pretty bad getting into the drone program was weird the introduction is like this is what we do we kill people and break things that is what our job is ike i worried

about it you know i got like can i do this can i actually kill someone could i actually pull the trigger i mean i'm not actually pulling the trigger i'm guiding the missile in but it's essentially the same thing i don't i don't see a difference we typically flew in iraq between eight thousand and twelve thousand feet in there and if you're in afghanistan we flew between eighteen and twenty five thousand feet. and depending on atmospherics it was a completely clear day you definitely get a good picture and a painting of how close you were you could probably read the license plate on someone's car we can see something as simple as people playing soccer game you can see individual players and you can see the. wife. with the muscle of one of the so with the whole of the still a. little more sometimes you have only your. dog . that i met at a party with little. meal

better but a little warm. it would have been a seven or eight hour trip hold sixteen year old terry very treacherous to write three potential telephone hotspots. and of course i'm to try and survive. i it was the first time that the international media the drone victims tribal elders and the general public came together was held in a five star hotel the trouble of the spoken terms of political implications how they felt and the drone victims spoke about personal story it's. legal.

now now i think i might find out we're going to. learn something about this. stuff. that. it was a bad thing to get the voice of the victims of don't attack out to the general public as well as the rest of the way not because the main goal we were going to use the media to try and establish who had been killed and also why where and how because of the inaccessibility of the west are stunned it's very very hard to compile any kind of credible evidence so evidence that other people see as credible that was part of the e-mail but i use this conference in islamabad we called it a j a j a guy is a traditional tribal battle that's what people are not ever used to settle the dispute but i think i think i think i think i think i.

have one stage i came from so young boy terry concedes when i was talking to terry . one of the first things that he did was he handed me his cousin's student id card and i looked at it i looked back at terry and i noticed that he was crying. he started to tell me the story of his cousin who'd been killed from a drone strike he'd come to juggle primarily to inform us a little bit more about what happened to his cousin and to people in his local village and find out how to stop mccain and we sat together all day we ate together at lunch time we left together we became friends very close stream intelligence and only to be around he had no sense of humor he was fascinated by photography and intrigued by western music mentioning artists and one that sprang to mind was maybe gaga starts to talk about drone strikes in his village how he was unable to sleep

at nights he was scarce he was worried about his family his friends terry was traumatized he wanted to talk about how he was affected by drone attacks and basically to give the message that the people of possessed and want justice against the killings of innocent civilians under john attack that are operated by the u.s. all right thank you. thank you thank you so. worried. because i. think they. felt that i need. to say that. i i. think. and people who are gathered that adopted

a resolution condemning strikes i think. the outcome of the joker was a big success because it allowed people to come together to listen to stories and come to a common resolution. then we went to get the jury rally and tariq aziz traveled there with us. travel towards the rally and tariq sat next to me he seemed relaxed he was laughing with his friends terry and everybody else clapped and they went to the rally. i. i happen to like tang's came to support a giant rally on sunday the first test against the united states going to back in pa. i i i i i i i. i i i

i i do back tariq aziz and you know the attendees returned to their homes the return money your future here's your chance to see you were. you somebody was your husband all right it. should be a mission that i look at seeking a look at those saved by the by image my by side with the. that's got to go to those who are in the into the going or didn't want to know that i'm so good. i'm but actually. coming back. to this time of the coming time when and then when i'm

a bit sad to menzies yeah because it was. just not on. the order for. you to stop loss i. see so that in the senate in the senate and so do. many of the most outspoken of the day. to this day that i go to called. funny even though you know i got to meet a few days nature after i'd come very very into the number one and i thought i was that way when we found out he had been tough on cold days off of that you have

received e-mail from shows not. the e-mail simply said tyreke as the heading and i can to instantly. to my shock i found out tariq being murdered by drawing strike and that was a shock move like oh i was it possible we were there was he was he doing in this like completely unbelievable moment others were not. going to. get that accused of the what are we going to. get on that i.v. . what are we gonna we wouldn't mind initial thoughts were this wasn't happening this was just a dream we didn't think that the sixteen year old kid who wanted to talk about football would be killed in a drone attack the same week that we'd met him. why did it happen why was terry killed. if the u.s.

had any information that tara cozies was part of a criminal organization was planning to carry out attacks states and our federal law enforcement agents she had been working with the authorities of pakistan to arrest him and one reason is toss the question why the government was not able to arrest or even question this is islam by talking once the capital of the country population is a brilliant people i'm not. sure it was a group public event this is a big towel that was asked to tell us why it was an open event terror because ease was plainly visible to hundreds and hundreds of people. who talked with reporters everything about him that the authorities could have wanted to know about his location and about his recent activities were known to the united states. so the extreme easy for them to approach him sit down and talk to him or for that matter put him in jail but instead the cia chose to go and kill them without giving him

the opportunity to give his side of whatever his that they thought that he had done this no evidence there whatsoever and they're giving him no no ideas that is no judge and there's no jury. our preference is always to capture if we can because we can gather intelligence but a lot of the terrorist networks that target the united states the most dangerous ones operate in very remote regions and it's very difficult to capture them but what we can discern from the pattern of strikes is that essentially pakistan's been declared a no captures around that automatically captures not considered feasible if you just look at the numbers there have been dramatically more people killed in recent years that have been captured they've you know killed maybe three to three to four thousand people in the. targeted killings. and they've captured a handful. of

gold pieces try to. come up people are going to. want to get fired for the short changing every minute of the a. mummy nolasco a. mile or less like the pavement. was full swing the sun setting all time low for most cases the most elite one slow sometimes from nothing the lead is so mean and simple. it's not just any of us still we can still be just getting to the safety a stage eight looked to be. but the jungle was selling.

her clothes. the a. mug. her. mug. rise of the islamic state or isis in the middle east is said to reorder political

realities in the region the west feel colonial agenda for the arab world is coming . arab spring has been replaced with a jihadi summer. drama's good chance be ignored to. stories others refuse to notice. faces change the world writes never. full picture of today's blog. from around the globe. looking. for another cia agents and reserve stuff so they rely on local people and this is where the fundamental news is these people who are working for you for money and that reliance is utterly misplaced and what you see and terex case and it just pains me

to say that you know without any real room for dispute that there was someone in that room when we were having our. who was an informant for the u.s. intelligence services and that that person picked out tarik i can tell you as a matter of fact the target was not an extremist and the way you know what intelligence they relied on to kill someone is what they released immediately after the killing and in that case they said poor militants were killed and of course we know that two kids were killed. that's how it happened. i asked the cia about the strike and their response was on that day no child was killed in fact the adult males for supporting al qaeda is so attention network so despite all of these technological assets and human assets or not there we don't know and i think

there is a lot of room for error. killing terry who is clearly breaking the law if it's it was further than it was just murder to wreak aziz was one of almost three hundred children killed why are these children being killed this is a targeted focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists the killing of treat disease has to call into question the credibility of the government's kill list methodology the vast majority of the strikes here are against people whose identities the government doesn't know we do not know where targeted killings are authorized to be used we do not know the specific identities of people who have been killed the constitution empowers the president to protect the nation from any imminent threat of attack so how can two rica's e's a sixteen year old boy possibly meet that definition of in

a threat the justice department has defined an imminent threat based not on whether the threat is specific and immediate which is what imminent means so that people pose imminent threats regardless of whether they're actually engaged in any ongoing media attack against the united states we have a responsibility to defend this country and that's what we're doing killing kerry hasn't made us any safer. it's taking away young boys. it's destroyed a family in a community under the interpretations we've heard from the administration and members of congress drone strikes could go on indefinitely against enemies that keep morphing into new enemies but killing should be the exception not the rule to wreak as he should never have died the u.s. should not have been using military force to attack innocent civilians let alone children. i would question a policy that says it is just

a minute and even sensible to assassinate a sixteen year old boy he was trying to be part of the constructive way forward. there's two guys in front and guy in the rear. watching of this path and. two guys in front are discussing like you can see them having a nap conversation they've got something slung over their shoulders which look to be. weapons man is portions of afghanistan are not so unsimilar from the mountainous regions of montana and seeing people with guns walking around the back end of stand. people are watching with guns and mountains of montana but as soon as we get eyes on him it's like immediately confirmed are weapons confirm your clear target so place the target at their feet and missiles

a way of getting off three of them. but the guy in the back it ends up cutting his leg. above the knee and severing his for more artery. and he's rolling around holding it and he says like rowing around but you can see where is leg is missing in the blood is spurting out in landing on the ground and it's cooling it's hot it's a hot pool of blood and cooling and we keep our eyes on in. watch the guy become the same colors the ground that he pled out on. i can almost see is facial expression it was. i can only see is mouth open in crying out. maybe cursed. or maybe he asked. for forgiveness for you know what his last thoughts were but it wasn't it wasn't

pretty whatever it was it was shock and trauma were probably ringing in he was bleeding out and he was. in agony. i didn't know how to react no one teaches you how to react they teach you how to do it. there's no big nor ignore the reaction are. i wished i never contributed further to that. for any strike at stake there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured the highest standard we can see. the vast majority of those killed in drone strikes. over ninety eight percent have not been high value targets.

of signature strikes make indiscriminate killing you know a policy what they end up with as what i described earlier the signature strike moved back to a greater reliance on these signature strikes a signature strike is a drone strike that isn't based on the identity of the target i obtained. classified u.s. intelligence reports on drone strikes what the documents reveal are the way that signature strikes are put together and these are strikes against people who fit in fit the signature of what the u.s. government says is a terrorist maybe they are walking into the compound with guns maybe they're getting in trucks and they're moving to the afghan border and drone operators seated thousands of miles away from the area affected are looking at video feeds assessing those video feeds and based on that making decisions about whether or not someone who's walking through the community is

a suspected terrorist you conclude on the basis of the behavior that they are a terrorist and you kill them. in number of cases that i looked at the cia wasn't sure who they were hitting. the agency became convinced that it had gotten so good at watching from above that it could distinguish different groups it could distinguish whether a terrorist leader was at a certain location but there is room for a lot of misunderstanding when you're doing something like conduct. signature strikes a drone strike is only as good as the intelligence that is behind the actual strike anyone who's worked in intelligence knows that intelligence doesn't quote unquote prove anything it's not evidence so drones hit what they aim to hit but if they're aimed at the wrong people then civilians are killed former u.s. ambassador cameron munter had said that one man's combatant was another man's chump

who went to a meeting when leon panetta was director of the cia somebody memorably said if he if leon sees a few guys doing jumping jacks on the ground he thinks that's a terrorist training camp classified documents suggest u.s. officials don't always know exactly how many or who they're killing they don't always have precise side id a parent a targeting of people whose identity is not known they may not be as precise as many u.s. officials claim as soon as those signature starts begin we start to see another steep escalation in civilian casualties so that's what happens when success stories go wrong numbers of people down because they don't. who is being killed in most of the drone strikes. on march seventeenth two thousand and eleven the target was held to help to resolve

a dispute over a chromite mine. if there is a feud getting out of hand. and everyone has a chance to speak and really is a democracy and that is a mechanism to make sure that they do stability in society. which i listen up with like a subset a must do was an awesome ulick i was a good. month but a girl is there but a marriage with a lot of great. they have. the jirga in an open space in a bus depot in broad daylight tribal elders informed the pakistani military brig did joe good was in command of the brigade on the border so he is a key commando the brigadier knew about the just got ten days in advance his own army camp was ten kilometers from the site of the jirga so this was an open

public event that pretty much everyone in the community and surrounding area knew about. the target begins in the morning at about ten o'clock and after a poignant yourselves. the devil must be a book i view it as a buzz among the muslims but i think you are about to get a four minutes out of them with lenders dramas i mean when there was some sort of a bubble of the windows social. there's smoke and debris and chaos it was a huge explorers of. people in the shop and the nearby if there must be a place i am. but you told my son bookish eventually. they were fresh from isaac is the most blood you're one how does a move the comedian michelle the modem then is that. their own defense or one is

a move a plot of on there will. be like a bush or more got them set up or there's more of a label how it's a person going to a national i'm a horrible deluded let's try to set up a meter so you will build. up some of what is really a slate of them. but that it is that i like is that from go go out of the deposition ago where there's an artist that leap that that was the mark of above one of.

the loss of who are leaders on a single day it's devastating for them. it's devastating terms of leadership it's devastating in terms of the moral compass instead of sitting in economic terms as well now. doesn't mean about oh you didn't look son will probably get a good kicking us through the whole mess anybody. the hulk or that f.a. out of the party back i don't know the cut you have had the what a like a you elect wants a lot of this drone strike is coming at the end of a series of drone strikes it's feeding into the sense of no one is safe no way soon nothing is safe even a jewel got the most cherished the most treasured institution of the tribal areas so we cannot even sit down and resolve an issue that is not see if any. three months after forty two civilians started john brennan stood up and said nearly for the past year there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency for cision of

the capability of unable to develop high level authorities tell the american public that there have been no civilian casualties. with the economic downturn in the final. days. sang night and the rest because i think the case will be every week. i'm out in martin the stories we cover here we're not going to hear in iraq that our big story the hamster madaline same time there's a reason they don't want to do now. that we don't think. now let's break the

set. america's military might and its foreign policy exist separately from one another the us is a formidable military power but sadly its weak foreign policy was that is why i'm not inclined to suspect the obama administration of pursuing some secret plan directed against the. language of what i will only react to situations i have read the reports from. the pollution and no i will leave it to the state department to comment on your latter point to say. mr kerry because i'm not talking no gonna. take you no more weasel words. when you made a direct question the prepared for a change when you have to punish the ready for

a. freedom of speech. down the freedom to crush. your shells target residential areas of eastern ukraine that have already suffered months of attacks the spike government promises that cities and villages would no longer be hit and. make a my behind me put me on the floor. they point to me in the face and one continent our teammates a palestinian teen who was beaten by police us protests against the alleged abuse of power by israel spread also. but still be inside so i mean they are reading it like the last face faith in their government the latest revelation of america has been spying on us german allies leaves the public wondering whether berlin will ever do anything to stop.