it's well written well researched very there are over so if you're looking for a prevailing get a handle on this question of drone warfare i can't think of any better for you recommend to you the best one i've seen on this  really excited to hear them speaking out against the guy to recognize that for the most part these are the big the same people who year after year after year have been authorized th street number while purchaser of weapons is the oppressive regime of saudi arabia that is using these weapons to kill well daily basis interventionist war in yemen and one of the weapons that they're using this letter that's been banned by the international community cluster munitions there was a vote in congress to ban cluster munitions to saudi arabia and even that did passed in congress and now there's going to be a vote on the senate side to ban cluster munitions and there is a democrat jack reed from rhode island who will lead blocking this listed in the us export of violence i mentioned the sale of weapons but there was also that delineation of our tax dollars to repressive regimes like israel we are giving now over three billion dollars of our taxpayer money to the israeli military that's using it for repression of the palestinian people we're also seeing our congress to a terrible thing which is real to try to do something to legislate that violence in the united states the military industrial complex is alive and well in the united states and both parties record weapons sales in the united states during his administration the number one weapon of choice for the obama administration in these wars overseas and especially in the in pakistan alone there has been over three hundred fifty drone strikes death toll who knows according to the bureau of investigative journalism they say somewhere between twenty five hundred and thirty five hundred people killed or americans with the advent of drones the u s president takes on the role of prosecutor judge jury and executioner in a secret court no transparency no oversight it's painful to a constitutional lawyer has relied so heavily on trails when asked why the former director of national intelligence said well drones were politically advantageous because they're cheap they do numbers will be somewhere in terms of civilian casualties they will say about one and you know we know that is killers absolutely ridiculous and when they put out their word get ready to  brief travels and meetings that there are hundreds if not thousands that have been killed so i would like to give a couple of examples so this becomes something that is human to  us in our trip to pakistan we met this man in your karim khan who is a journalist and he was away in the capital islamabad when he got a call in the middle of the night saying that it's home had been blown to bits by a drone killing his brother and his eighteen year old son his brother been a teacher in the village them it's a terrible crime or a terrible mistake they have to acknowledge what they did they have to apologize and they have to compensate the family could it be that my tribal culture he said this morning involved when it comes to justice that the united states of america even when it's around trying to strike is successful in killing a high level target it is often still captured if you're fighting against terrorism he said she said then why are you terrorizing us there was a stanford law school study that i say cited like well called living under drones show tool for extremists if the use of drones were successful we would see an end to terrorism in at least one of the places where we have been using them we don't see it ended to terrorist groups in fact we see the moves the pope boy from one place to another and guarantee a perpetual state of war they actually keep us away from the path of negotiations and diplomacy a u n report warning the water runs may be more targeted and other weapons they are easier to use and hold the lower social barriers against the use of lethal force it said use of drones rests ignoring peaceful approaches such as individual rests and trial using resources to help educate people poverty negotiation alliance building political solution which are all the way in the hand to stop the spread of that pakistanis have been using the word systems in the u k there is a group called reprieve that has been using the word systems in the united states the center for constitutional rights the a c l u have been trying to bring these issues into the has been opening up our airspace to grow loads that are supposed to be used to deliver packages for amazon or knows what else there are many police stations that are anxious to get drones to use them use of drones in the united states all this is having an impact i mentioned that it has an impact on public opinion but it's also having to act on the obama administration for years the administration  so mention this week we are awaiting the announcement by the ministration about the numbers of civilians they would never have even contemplated releasing any numbers had it not been for the immobilised global community is the only course they can push back against the normalization oh i've been widespread violence and demand international regulations oversight and what we really want is an end to the use station and they are there is the opening of diplomatic relations with cuba all the rest is really a continuation of the bush policies in one form or another and a continuation perpetual church for allowing such a policy to emerge from such a promising administration this policy should be condemned by the liberals and conservatives by those who  do justice and walk humbly before god and then he asks where is the outcry for such a policy from the black religious community where the drumming is for justice he said when it it and finally he said if the church does not speak out against this immoral holocene we will lose a war of choice our soul our right to represent and preach the gospel of jesus christ i want to end with two things one is a quote by another reverential who many of you might know from the work that he did for so long on nuclear against little lovers quarrel with the world so that when we do partners like we leave behind a little more truth a little more justice a little more peace a little more unity then we wouldn't be in there have you not cared enough about the human race drone warfare program only light can overcome darkness you can't overcome hate with more hate only love can overcome hate and so i think we've been putting forward more and more imagination when it comes to that question because we have been stuck in this rut of just war doctrine and it's time i think for us to start moving beyond just for toward just peace making let's think about the positive out there where we can be proactive to transform ourselves our societies in this world and it's only as we begin to get that kind of imagination that we can get out of this rut another thing i was reminded of is something i've said quite often whether we have a democratic president or a republican one we are equal opportunity protesters with you doing the wrong thing to be protesting doesn't matter what party you're with and if you're doing the right thing then you're going to hear praise from us and get our support we're going to have our next two speakers and then take questions for all three of  them and we have short bio's on each speaker in your path but i just want to say in bringing up christopher air and i'm really pleased he could be here today this is the second regional conference that he will be speaking at he was at the ston point friends in april one reason i'm really happy he's here is nobody can say that he doesn't know what he's talking about because he's been part of the drone program up until two thousand and nine but he did something that i think is exemplary and that i think all people should do but especially people of faith and that is to stand up and say no when you see something wrong happening and be willing to put your own well being at risk when you do that and that's what  much i'm honored to be here and thank you for the opportunity to share my experience with you and that's really all that i am speaking toward it's my experience and the lessons that i learned from my time working in the intelligence community and deployed overseas before i do i just want to ask you for one brief moment of silence for all the individuals that i killed or helped to kill thank you i was in the intelligence community and for five years two of those years were at the cia where i was primarily involved with the drone program i spent some time working on some other programs as well related to satellite reconnaissance and i guess you could say that i was part of the nine eleven generation i was in college when the attacks happened on the twin towers and i remember very distinctly at that point feeling why here is my chance here is my opportunity to do something with my career as i start out in the world that will matter in some sort of way my grandfather fought in world war two it was in europe and i often remember in some sense idolizing him for what i perceive to be as is fighting the good fight and i wanted an opportunity to do so as well my career as i said brought me to the drone program after a few years i deployed twice to iraq and afghanistan from two thousand and six two thousand and nine for six months each and while i was working on the program i had something of a real education my eyes were very much opened and i began to see a real lack of foresight a real lack of planning a callousness toward the ramifications of war and killing by the political leaders who were directing us and the military leaders who were actually carrying out the policy we were primarily engaged  killing and capturing the senior taliban and al qaida members in iraq and afghanistan and i remember very specifically one of the first significant kills that we had when i first started on the program in two thousand and six who was the second in command theoretically of al qaida his name was bob wells or car and i remember there was a sense of celebration in the agency when we killed him and people were cheering and passing around what they call these statutes that almost look like little baseball cards showing who the person was who it was connected to and there is the sense that ok we're actually making progress here we're doing something we're getting them and i think that was really my attitude especially during my first deployment in two thousand six by my second deployment two thousand and nine three years later i began to see with my own eyes this a real divide between what i was being told by the military leaders by the politicians and what and what i was observing which was really not an increase in security it was a lack of security there were more suicide bombers blowing themselves up on the base there were more mortars being shot in and you know even just looking at the maps of areas under coalition control we have lost areas of control over those three years even while all the resources all the tankers all the food all the oil being shipped in and burned and consumed and all the deaths taking place on both sides of the conflict so i began to say what are we really doing here and i cannot claim that i have all the answers but the same part of my mind that led me into this career field wanted to see things with my own eyes and investigate things lead me down a path of inquiry that i'm still on to this day i have arrived at certain observations and conclusions that i want to share with you just a few specific examples of what i experienced in the program for example  in afghanistan we would target as i say some of the some of the senior leaders in the taliban and some of the low level commanders you could say and i remember we would watch for anywhere from a few hours to a few days sometimes a few months and in some of the tribal regions in afghanistan you have these these in the dross of these religious schools where a member of the taliban will be a town elder a town leader and he will also be the teacher at the school and he'll be teaching anywhere from ten to twenty young boys usually between the ages of eight and thirteen and we would observe these people and we would see them teaching we would know that they were teaching because they would go out into the middle of a few old almost as if on a field trip and you would see the teacher sit in the middle with the students around and we would have a service with the drone feeds and then at some point whenever the signal was given we would shoot a missile at th or we would provide oversight as a more more larger five hundred pound bomb would be dropped on a compound perhaps where he was living or sleeping overnight and i just remember at that time starting to think what is actually happening from the standpoint of the children here from the from the people who live in that town even if one were to accept a promise that we are still going after or we're going after quote unquote terrorists or the people who were responsible in some way for nine eleven even if you accept that from the standpoint of the children who are left after their teacher is killed suddenly every prophecy that is he's been saying for the last several years everything they know that the west is out to get us that the united states hates us everything is true so the prophecy is true the man becomes a martyr but from our standpoint from our management and intelligence agencies we have just had success we have just been successful and we can add that individual to our list of targets that have been taken out get more funding for the next year but basically underneath it all sowing the seeds for this continuous war and that's what i really started to observe a continuous war and we used to joke and this was a really sick joke but when you're right in the middle of it when you're participating at the time especially when you're first out of college and really drinking the kool aid as they refer to it it's very easy to get caught up in that kind of group thin and we started to observe that we were really playing this it was like playing this game whack a mole which is one of these are kid games where you smash one of these moles down and as soon as want to smash to get a point and another one pops back up and that's exactly what we were doing when i look back on there were so there were these strategic errors there were operational errors and that's the program tremendous turnover both in afghanistan and iraq and within the intelligence agencies so whereby you will have one person or let's say a small team who is observing a specific compound they're watching a high level target come in and out of that compound over the course of a few days or few weeks that person's rotation is over they go home someone else takes their place and suddenly there's no one who knows literally what's happening inside that building and or the idea that the drone program and all the associated intel behind it is this streamlined efficient bad guy killing machine is completely false did we kill quote unquote bad guys yes absolutely so i can't say that there are not successes as the agencies would define them but were we causing are we causing more harm than good over the long run absolutely and so i did resign in two thousand and nine it took me i received another offer in two thousand and ten to come back to the program and it went through a tremendous spiritual and emotional struggle trying to figure out whether or not this was really what i was on the planet to do you know with with money and  bonuses and everything being thrown at you as a young as a young man it's sometimes difficult to know what to do in those situations but ultimately and i thank god for this i feel like i did receive some sort of guidance from somewhere that told me that this was not what i was on the planet to do to look back and say that i was just killing people for the majority of my career so i did step away finally from that offer in two thousand and ten and it did take me a number of years though to arrive at this point being able to speak about this the the the attitude from the military quite often when we would be watching certain compounds and having what can only be understood to be human  errors we cannot know everything even through all the forms of intelligence that we had the attitude from the military when we as analysts did not know was yes and so there wasn't a tolerance for we don't know if we're looking at women or children or chicken for that matter give us your answer so we can move forward with the wars i was in route in two thousand and nine from afghanistan to iraq and i was in kuwait i was waiting for a plane and i was stranded for about three days because there were these wind storms coming through and everything and i was in kuwait in one of the tents with about fifteen other soldiers and this was already at the point where i was starting to have some serious doubts as to what was happening in this policy as medea which appears to be something along the lines of perpetual war and i was really searching for answers and so i was stranded in this tent for a few days with nothing to do and with you know it the only book that i had packed with me was george orwell's one thousand nine hundred four now a lot of us have to read this book in high school it's required reading it  was at least for me and we're often told about themes of big brother and the thought police which are very important themes yes but when i was in this tent for three days but with nothing but to really read through that book in very fine detail i started to pick up on some nuggets of wisdom that i believe were transmitted by orwell of course that was his pen name it's his real name was erik blair and as i started to look just briefly into the bio of america where i realized through reading about him that in the one nine hundred forty s he was actually privy to some of the upper levels of  british elite political circles and so a lot of what he was writing of course was written as fiction but with these elements of truth those warnings as we all know and about two thirds of the way through the book there is what's called the book within the book and that's where the leader of the resistance is basically explaining the policy that the inner party it's using and one of the policies is  and they explain that this perpetual war is actually a policy between the various countries not only to result in the deaths of human beings but actually as a way to extract the wealth of prosperity from humanity as a whole through the form of taxation inflation and then to blow that up on the other side of the planet and they even make the point that in another way to do that would be to just pay people to dig holes and then fill them back up again but that wouldn't accomplish the psychological benefits that keeping the society in a perpetual state of war would and i'm not saying this is one hundred percent of what every single person involved in either the drone program or the political system the united states is geared toward but using the same level of analysis that i was using for the cia when i read this this is something that hit the bell in my mind and was one of the only things that i could use to make sense of what i was observing with my own two eyes a series of continuous conflicts that had absolutely no definable winnable goal and we see this continuing whether or not there is a  drawdown in troops whether or not officially the war in iraq has been called over there are still tens of thousands of troops and many more contractors doing the fighting there and all these other countries as well so i came back in two thousand and nine with sort of this different perspective and i realized that i could not continue that and i realized that you know and i realize now in speaking with us that this is a very dark subject very dark theme and reverend bob stole the words from my mouth right before i was going to come up which is that another one of these lessons that we learned in high school in science class is that darkness is really the absence of life and i feel as though we do have the opportunity to shine some light into this darkness by spreading some of this message and by some compassion with some of the victims and perhaps a hint of forgiveness there as well so i thank you for the opportunity to speak here today this means a lot to me thank you when i think about the first two words of the title of this current faithful witness faithful witness i can't think of any better example of that than robert m smith better know and against violence and witnessing for the love of god and the call to peace me he is indefatigable he is consistent he is person is it and he is a faithful witness he is the more drone strikes are being conducted just a few dozen miles from here around the world and bob's live has been the leader in helping us and then the murders i have experienced such a sense of then we have for some good lively question and answer here but would like to start now that any of our presenters so i think what you're implying is is this it's the issue is whether it's just cause or not or just cause not so much the weapon right so we're saying that what is the cause i mean what what are they trying to do and i think for many of us here we can say we know that violence is not the answer i think for those people who might not agree with that premise we could say your solution is not working we've been doing this now for fifteen years and with the drones we've been doing it since two thousand and nine it is not solving anything so should we try to look for something else it's that but i agree with what the premise is to say that drones are just a piece of technology and that  are dropping bombs within an unmanned aircraft or a manned one doesn't matter to who you are killing on the ground and that for us to say the drones are have a particularities in that they make it easier to get involved in conflicts but that the basic thing is that the military intervention is not helping whether it's drones or some other kind of weaponry there's two sides to that answer one is that there are several air force enlisted former enlisted members who have begun to speak out they were speaking out  over the last several years actually the last two or three years before me we are all being represented by the same lawyer just on rather who is sort of helping us to avenues to speak such as this so there are like i said a handful of other people who are speaking out now and the issue for me is no one else from the intelligence community has thus far spoken out that i'm aware of and there are differences of laws that do not apply to me as a former member of the intelligence community for whistleblower protection that do apply because they were in the military per se so you know when i was working there did i have conversations with individuals who i was working with to this extent like what are we doing here absolutely but would they every willing to risk their career at this point five ten years later i haven't seen it  far so there are a few others but they are they worked not us analysts one of them worked as a sensor operator the other worked as a technician like fixing the drones and some of the other people worked on various other related aspects within the air force out soon it'll be on p b s in the not too distant future it's called national bird and it actually features a handful of former drone operator some of you may know realize this but on average it takes one hundred eighty personnel to operate a single drone strike it's not just one person behind a console it's intelligence people it's sensor operators it's all kinds of thing so this is this is a large scale operation anyway these drone operators featured in this film is quite powerful i've seen an advance copy of that have ha well i'm a strange person to ask because i'm not a member of the democratic party nor of the republican party i'm an independent but let's ask here who here is a member considers yourself a member of the democratic party  so that looks like a lot who doesn't and of those who don't how many of you are green party and how many of you are independent libertarian washington d c that one there are some really wonderful members of congress who are part of the progressive caucus and i appreciate working with them where i believe from hank johnson lso they have the ability to affect more change than people who are not part of the two party system i always supported bernie sanders angela stein i don't see any contradiction in that so and i don't criticize people who are members of the democratic party i don't criticize people for whoever they vote for what party they're with i think our problem has been to be so holier than thou of saying you know i am in this party i'm this person and all that does is divide us and we've got to get beyond that work together on the things that we do agree with like it's time to end these endless wars and not worry about party affiliation unfortunately i don't know i could just be very straight up i don't know i think about it i'm not sure if anyone else well thanks to our tax dollars that go to darpa the research ira the military there has been tremendous amount of money that's poured into making drones more and more autonomous and that means to move from having a human in the loop and having them be preprogrammed and the navy is the furthest ahead on this having these naval carriers that are moving towards having autonomous drones that would be based on these  these these carriers that would make the bases you wouldn't even need to have down bases anymore and you wouldn't even need to have the pilots and the analysts that are being used now so it is very scary stuff and this is one of the campaigns that some of the international organizations have been involved in to ban the use of autonomy list robots before they are actually in in practice and the u n has been taking up this issue but you know the u s continues to move forward on the research because a lot of our drawn strikes are now conducted as what is known as signature strikes they don't know exactly who they're hitting only knows that looks like there's a bunch of people who look like they might be military  men i've seen some footage that shows their polling twelve year olds and military me and it's in a place where there might be terrorists and they say because that is there's no way that can be moral that's just saying to a machine to kill whoever you see that's the direction this is going and you can see the kind of moral decline that our nation is on question number interesting issue as well because i mean for example what we consider the cia somewhere between sixty to seventy percent of the people working there are either employed by another agency or a contractor so you know and that was actually my background to get there i took a lateral transfer from another small agency that most people have never heard of  a and there are people who were sitting right alongside with who are reservists who are receiving military people who are contractors doing the exact same work i mean much of the decision making as to where bombs are going to be dropped is coming from contractors these days and then there's the whole issue of the difference between pay and needed someone who's doing it on a contract employed and then a significant fraction last if your paycheck is coming from the military itself so that adds another layer of tension but that also is allowing the administration to claim that they have reduced the soldiers by whatever the percentage is that they say now down seventy percent a lot of those have been replaced by people doing it from the private  i mean that's that's an extremely deep question i have several thoughts and first i want to say i think we all need to sometimes rewind back in our minds to september eleventh morning wherever you were everyone remembers where they were what were we feeling on that level at that moment and how did that impact our actions immediately and before we started to realize some of the things that we are i mean some individuals i'll give it to them including i'm sure individuals here immediately said you know this is just a set up for war but we have to be honest to say  people were thinking that as they were watching the towers fall everyone was thinking what are we going to do someone needs to do something we're under attack  was twenty years old when that happened going to school in virginia looking for a career field looking for a path i was raised by a very liberal parents outside of boston who never allowed me to play with toy guns or g i joes or or violent video games or anything like that i rebel specifically because i had it in my mind that i wanted to fight a good fight in my generation like i said my grandfather who i last so there's another component of this which is not just where were we on that moment of september eleventh how impressionable were we i believe and this is going to be controversial i believe that men especially young men i do have a drive within them and i'm not saying that women don't have a comparable drive to do things in the world but for men there is there is some sort of innate piece i believe of our physiology that wants to go out in the world i mean why are young men attracted to this sort of thing to signing up joining the navy sailing around the world wanting to get into a fight of some sort why there is something in the biology i believe and it's a question of how do we how to channel what do we provide as outlets for a young man that is an ox about blowing innocent people up on the other side of the world now i think it's a different question fifteen years later because we havea in front of us but that's what i was thinking i was part biology part culture he gave me an excellent reflection what you're about to hear at the end of one of the evenings and i just found it very powerful so we asked him become a common chair again so please listen for  or as they called it fire from heaven let's read the passage when the drains through near for jesus to be taken up he said his face to go to jerusalem and he sent messengers ahead of him on their way they entered samaritans to make ready for him but they did not receive him because his face was set towards jerusalem when his disciples james and john saw it they said lord do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them but he turned and rebuked them then they went on to another building so in this text two of jesus most beloved disciples are ready to engage in an act of terror by calling fire down on their social enemies and these disciples are explicit they intend this fire from heaven to destroy the samaritans they have been disrespected they have been offended their response is a visceral cry for holy revenge just before this incident the disciples were arguing about who would be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven power was on their minds they wanted to use him to destroy the hated samaritans w gotten in their way now it's only a few days later in luke's narrative in chapter ten that jesus recounts the story of a traveler going from jerusalem to jericho who was attacked by the eaves and left beside the road to die we know the story respected religious leaders come by a priest and to lead by neither of them attends to the wounds of the traveller the disciples are clued into the structure of the story they know the third person who cause is going to be the hero likely someone like them imagine that these cycles chagrin when the one who stops to aid the wounded man is not a and inserts him into the story as the one offering god's grace feeling and mercy in the context of the social animosity in the tie and the disciples of lived experience this must have been shocking now from our vantage point it's so great a distance in time that cultural and social context it's it's hard for us to imagine how scandalous this must have sounded so i asked a group of high school students recently whom from our current context they would insert it into the story that would seem a scandalous to us a samaritans did to the disciples and i got two very quick answers the first it was a terrorist the second  was donald trump are we beginning to feel the scandal well let me now offer a few reflections number one if the impulse to resort to an act of terror is in the hearts of jesus both the love of the site surely it's in our hearts in some translations of the text jesus says you don't know what spirit you are of the impulse to use violence against enemies and give it a deep vine blessing is a strong temptation that jesus rejects surely this temptation is in the very air that we breathe these many years later the use of violence at its deepest level is spiritual issue and as a face faith community we must ask ourselves the spiritual questions do we know what spirit we are of what is the spirit of the dru what is the spirit of the political and economic structures that have created it to in this encounter the samaritan village and the story we often describe as the good samaritan jesus does not engage in detail ethical arguments about fire from heaven when we're against whom and under what circumstances it may be used instead jesus introduces an entirely new paradigm by demonstrating that the disciple social enemies the some merit to those can be instruments of god's grace and healing through jesus intervention born out of his own relationships with the samaritan community the enemy becomes human capable of mercy and the entire framework changes have we as a faith community and never to know the humanity of those caught in the crosshairs of our government's drone strikes by whose paradigm are we losing the empire or that given to us three finally it is interesting to note that the disciples longing to called out fire on the samaritan village required divine intervention and intervention of jesus fairly denied we on the other hand package fire from have it in a high tech weaponry that can deliver death when and where we choose a lot of people we do not know whose deaths we do not more without any consultation with the divine have we and our high tech systems of security become gods unto ourselves and we lost touch with our own humanity and our dependence on  what is the spirit of the drone do we know the humanity of our enemies by first paradigm are we living and what has become of our own humanity a quick and fell in love of america upon his return to yemen enjoyed talking about his experiences and became somewhat of a master of the united states and u s culture among his family and friends but then in april two thousand thirteen there was a u s drone strike in his village five suspected militants were killed and in a powerful testimony to the u s congress on april twenty three twenty thirty three a said and i quote several  my village is beautiful but it is very poor and in a remote part of yemen in the past most of the villagers knew little about the united states my story is about my experiences in america by american trends and the american values that i saw for myself help the villagers i talk to understand the america that i know and love now however when i when they think of america they think of the terror they feel the drones that hover over their heads ready to fire missiles at any time they call and text it be that night with questions that i could not answer why was the united states terrifying them with these drones why was the united states trying to kill a person w missile when everyone knows where he is then he could easily have been arrested what radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village one drone strike accomplished in an instant there is now an intense anger growing hatred of america friends the calculus that claims victory with five militants are killed and entire village becomes angry at us is bankrupt is there not more power more hope more potential for a world that is secure and peaceful and the people that people to people diplomacy exhibited by for real then all the destructive power of drone strikes and military and so in this gathering we are challenge not only to actively resist the seat ducked of paraffin paradigm of fire from heaven but to live by another paradigm entirely the one exhibited by jesus  his respect for relationships with samaritans the one exhibited by jesus who spoke for justice in occupied territory for the empire with babies to the sword and hung insurrectionists on process together let us borrow what it means to show up in our present day story as the good america the good christian the good jews the good muslims the good  the ones who show mercy to all who are wounded the ones who respect the humanity of our enemies the ones who remember our own dependence on god the ones who practice peace trade for peace and bac