So that is construed as, you know, hey, they're moving towards our people. So at one point, they're heading towards the military, the American force that's on the ground. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) They're going to do something nefarious.ĬOCKBURN: So whatever the vehicles did was fitted into that threat. Praying? I mean, seriously, it's what they do.ĬOCKBURN: Everything was being fitted into a predetermined context of a threat. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) This is definitely it. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) They're praying.ĬOCKBURN: They get out to pray, which is what millions of - billions of Muslims do every morning, anywhere in the world. Central Afghanistan.ĬOCKBURN: The adults got out on a riverbank. Even though the images were too blurry to really be able to tell, they were relaying that message up the chain of command - what they call the kill chain.ĪBDELFATAH: 5:18 a.m. They suspected the group of people they were seeing through the drone images were MAMs - lingo for military-aged males, a.k.a. I know they're shady, but come on.ĪRABLOUEI: This interaction, which is dramatized here, comes from the actual transcript released by the military of conversations between drone operators on this mission. I don't think they have kids at this hour. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Bullshit.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Screeners say at least one child in their SUV. So when the three rickety vehicles caught the eye of the drone, the operators were on high alert. Special Forces team looking for insurgents was conducting a raid.
#Warfare 1917 last stand tv
A routine day for a drone operator is mostly incredibly boring, sitting there looking at a TV screen for hours and hours and hours and hours, in which normally not much is happening.ĪRABLOUEI: But on this particular day, the drone was deployed to keep watch over the area where a U.S. And then they could see inside the vehicles individual blobs, which would be the people, and it's all completely silent. To a windowless metal box at a military base just outside Las Vegas, Nev.ĬOCKBURN: And that appears on the screen of the drone operators.ĪRABLOUEI: Dressed in dark green Air Force flight suits with their hands on a joystick, the drone operators zoom in on the video image they've just received.ĬOCKBURN: That blurry, you know, somewhat indistinct image - black and white and shades of gray with the, you know, generally black and then blobs for the vehicles. Then by fiber optic cable across Western Europe, across the Atlantic, across the continental United States.ĪRABLOUEI. Then down to a receiver in Ramstein, Germany.ĬOCKBURN. Twenty-two thousand miles up above.ĪRABLOUEI. Below its belly, a sensor with cameras tracked their every move, snapping infrared heat-sensing images and transmitting them to a satellite orbiting the Earth.ĬOCKBURN. And they were wrong.ĪRABLOUEI: Fourteen thousand feet above them, a predator drone as big as a three-story building flew between the clouds, virtually invisible to anyone looking up at the night sky, like a giant hawk circling its prey. They thought, you know, they could get through in the dark, and no one would see them. Hazaras, who are a Shia population in Afghanistan, who are considered heretics by the Taliban and treated mercilessly by the Taliban, and therefore they were afraid because they were traveling through Taliban-held territory. The men were hoping to find work in Kabul, or some of them were going on to Iran.ĬOCKBURN. Some of the women are carrying turkeys, which they were bringing as presents for their relatives they were going to stay with in Kabul. It was also very cold, and a group of poor people who were crammed into these three very rickety vehicles were headed to Kabul - men and women and children, altogether about 30 of them. Before we get started, we want to let you know that this episode contains reenactments of violence and language that might be upsetting to some listeners.ĪBDELFATAH: Sunday, February 21, 2010, on a mountain road in central Afghanistan.ĪNDREW COCKBURN: It was the middle of the night when the story starts.
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