Brandon Bryant, a former MQ1 Bravo Predator operator, exposes the U.S. drone program's moral decay, citing indiscriminate killings of civilians like Anwar al-Awlaki's daughter and the psychological toll on operators often rejected from other squadrons. He details how medical issues were ignored at Nellis Air Force Base, where over 200 shots fired annually reflected a "Wild West" environment driven by military-industrial greed rather than strategic victory. After facing harassment from colleagues like Rick Ryan Nearson and political silence from senators, Bryant advocates for a "second Nuremberg" trial to hold corporations accountable, urging ordinary people to reject vengeance in favor of justice and love. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Noble Causes and Collateral Damage00:14:58
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Hello, world.
On this episode of the Concrete Podcast, we talk to Brandon Bryant.
Brandon is a former MQ1 Bravo.
Predator sensor operator for the U.S. Air Force, who flew armed predator drones over Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
He has since come forward with information from inside the U.S. military's secret drone program, specifically on the issues of civilian deaths or collateral damage, as well as the struggles of drone pilots with substance abuse and post traumatic stress disorder.
The daily work of tracking and killing people as an operator took a psychological toll on Brandon, and since he left, he's been struggling with the pressures of going public as a whistleblower.
The drone program still remains highly under wraps, even as the military continues to carry out targeted killing campaigns around the world.
Begun by the George W. Bush administration but massively expanded and normalized under Barack Obama, air wars waged by drone and conventional aircraft now continue in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
Without further ado, please welcome Brandon Bryant.
Thanks again for doing this, man.
Super stoked to talk to you.
Yeah, no worries.
I'm honored that you've chosen my story to be interested in.
When I first saw your story online, I never could have imagined what it would be like actually controlling some of these predator drones that you flew.
So, for people out there who don't actually know your story, let's give you like sort of an introduction for this podcast.
Right.
So, you flew, you operated predator drones for the U.S. Air Force from 2006 to 2007.
From 2006 to 2011, right?
Correct.
Okay.
And now you're essentially a whistleblower on the program.
Correct.
Because you.
Let me put it this way.
Let me just ask you this.
What is the problem with the United States using drones for warfare?
I'll just reference Sun Tzu's in the art of war.
He says that protracted warfare is not beneficial to the state.
And he says that our.
Warfare is evil inherently, but if you have to do it, here's how you do it to win.
And we're using drones not to win, but to bring devastation and control over an area.
So, in the art of war, in that philosophy, what we're doing with drones is inherently evil because we're not using them to finish the war and win.
If we are, well, we're not even in a war, we're overseas contingency.
That's what they call it.
My own personal reasons for doing it is that we are.
Indiscriminately killing human beings and celebrating it, and then uh, pretty much destroying uh, whatever moral fabric or moral law that we are um, supposedly fighting for.
I don't think a lot of people understand that drone strikes primarily kill civilians, is that right?
Um, it's not inherent, like, it's not like they go, Oh, this guy's walking his dog, we're gonna kill him.
No, it's not, it's not inherently that, it's more like.
But bystanding civilians, just as a consequence of killing one person who lives in a building, they're going to kill.
They call it collateral damage.
And it's a term that they use to marginalize an individual human's life and just make them a tally mark.
I saw a lot of really bad crap while I was in.
And I've only really talked about my own experiences and my own.
My own sin and shame, but um, they would really like if there was probably 15 people at a wedding and they were gonna, they were there to strike two, the 15 people were collateral damage worth getting those two people.
So, an example would be if some Rambo character whose job was to go overseas and go take out a terrorist target, and this guy is just going through an entire apartment building with his.
With his automatic weapons, just slaying every innocent bystander, all the women and children on his way up to the top floor to find the terrorist, just murdering dozens of people in this building before he actually gets the target.
This guy would be a war criminal.
This guy would be in a prison somewhere.
It's the same like President Trump just, or former President Trump, pardoned four Blackwater dudes for doing that, right?
They went into it.
They were basically in downtown Baghdad and were murdering people on the street.
And that is essentially what drones do, just in an unpersonal type of way.
Yeah, it's a weird thing where if you just take us out of it, if you remove us from it, it's this weird thing where it's like now it's this bridge that we're able to cross.
In a sense, it's, you know, there's, I talk a lot about warrior culture and warrior philosophy because I grew up in a family of wrestlers, right?
So, from the moment that I could pretty much walk, I was on or around the wrestling.
And in wrestling, you face your opponent.
You know, you work hard, you train, you understand your body and how you move, and maybe study the enemy's movement so that you can beat them.
With drones, there's no facing your enemy.
There's just, you're basically taking people who are incapable of operating on that level of physicality and giving them the ability to glorify war in a way that makes them feel like they're participating.
I kind of feel like it's a lot like the QAnon conspiracy crap where people want to feel involved and like they're doing something for the greater good or they're part of a movement, but really all it is is just indiscriminate violence.
Now, the argument against this would be we're doing this to keep people safe here in America, right?
Right.
Or boots off the ground.
That's another one.
What do you say to that argument?
I say that we devalue the people that are part of the warrior class that dedicate themselves to sacrificing their life for a noble cause, right?
In the spiritual world of the warrior, they would talk about how even if you are a noble and good warrior and you're fighting an ignoble cause, what you're doing is a sin.
And so we're taking people who, let's say, let's compare drones to a sniper, right?
A sniper's in country.
They're sitting there with their partner.
They're monitoring.
They're sometimes sitting, laying down for days at a time without moving, right?
Takes a whole bunch of concentration and skill, like years of training.
Well, you're putting that same kind of power within the drone operators, but you're taking.
Young men and women out of high school and giving them the power without the training and glorifying something that doesn't deserve to be glorified.
Now, isn't another thing that, like, we just tell people going to war, going off to fight wars, that they're fighting for a noble cause, they're fighting for freedom.
But in these regime change wars and in the history of our wars, they have always been for the acquisition.
Of something for the acquisition of oil or whatever it might be.
But we tell these people, we tell our military, our warriors, they believe that they're fighting for a noble cause.
They believe that they're fighting for freedom or for peace.
Have you ever read Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman's On War and On Killing?
No.
So he's got two books, On War and On Killing.
And On Killing is probably my favorite of the two because it talks about the psychological cost of killing in warfare.
And throughout history, the idea of fighting for a noble cause is given to every group of soldiers that fight, even though we can see through our own lens now that usually most people die in a very painful way.
People cry out for their mothers.
But what he says on killing is that we have to glorify it.
A soldier has to glorify and Say what he's doing is good in order for him to get past the barriers that prevent him from actually taking the steps necessary.
The term that is used is drinking from the waters of the river Lethe, which is in Greek mythology when you're dead, you have to cross the river Lethe and it erases all the memories from your past so that you can be reborn again.
And Mars or Ares, the god of war, gives a cup of the river of Lethe to each of the warriors that.
Fights, you know, so we forget the lessons of history and our society, or we're not even taught it.
And so we must, so, so, you know, we have to.
Soldiers see their friends and brothers and people die, and they have to say that there's a reason for it.
You know, people who lose family in the wartime, they have to say, well, my son or my.
Brother, sister, mother, father sacrificed their life for a noble cause, and it makes them feel better about the loss, the death, right?
And without that aspect of it, people would be in despair and people would be up in arms.
And righteously, they should be up in arms because if we look at the last 20 years, what have we accomplished at all with our conflicts over in the Middle East and Africa?
We've just destabilized the world even more.
For what purpose?
They want to get rid of Iran because of some sort of control over monetary value of something.
It's complete greed.
We're not fighting for a noble cause.
We're not fighting an enemy.
There was a guy who was trained by the CIA who got men to fly planes into places in the United States.
It wasn't a group of people.
Who was an entire culture?
It wasn't a specific country, it was a person trained by the United States military, United States organizations and institutions that eventually turned on the United States and started this whole conflict.
You know, if we look at what happened right before 9 11, the day before 9 11 happened, I think it was Colin Powell getting on MSNBC and talking about how there's trillions of dollars that are unaccounted for at the Pentagon, and all of a sudden 9 11 happened.
If we look at Halliburton and Cheney, they've made trillions of dollars off this war, and we see that our country is in severe debt.
Our people are in poverty.
It's hard to get health care.
It's hard to get food.
It's hard to get shelter.
So we've really just destroyed our entire culture for an emotional reason rather than a logical reason or even a spiritual reason.
When I first joined the military, I didn't do so to kill.
I joined under the intelligence program.
I did so because I was going to get four to six years, get my education, get out.
I didn't intend to join the drone program.
I just scored high enough that they just shoved me into it.
But when I was joining the military, I asked my family, they watched Fox News.
They're the typical Republican Christians that don't even think for themselves.
But they were saying that we need to go over there.
We need to destroy the enemies of God and all that type of stuff.
But when I actually joined, they were like, oh, you're going to go overseas and get killed.
Like, we don't want you to do that.
So they were willing to send other people to die.
But when it came to a personal sacrifice, that ideal was put in jeopardy.
And then once I actually went through the experience and came out and started talking to my family, I was wrong because I was no longer in agreement with their ideology.
They still think that we need to be over there.
And unfortunately, the Christians that I know still think that we need to be over there killing Muslims because they're the enemies of God.
We're not over there for anything else.
You know, well, where's the oil?
Where's the resources coming back here?
Where's You know, where's the democracy that we went to go stabilize?
You know, even if we look at the Kurds who Saddam Hussein was genociding, burying in mass graves, we went over there, and as soon as they're free, they're going up in north into Turkey, north of Mazul, and then we're using our own drones to help kill them with the Turkish military.
So we've betrayed our own allies over there, basically our only allies over there.
Reading Comprehension for Operators00:03:17
And it's what's it for?
It's for greed.
There's no nobility.
One of the biggest problems is it's really hard for anyone to have a deep, nuanced understanding of all these real issues, right?
How did you initially get involved in the whole drone program in the first place?
So, like I said, I joined to be an Intel operator.
And they told me that I would be working with people like James Bond and shit, and played on my 19 year old ego.
And sense of adventure.
But when I got through Intel school, I was in the top 10 percentile of my class.
And so they chose me.
Well, really, they chose I was the first, my class was the first class to be shoved into this program.
And then basically every class after me for a year were shoved into the drone program to the point where they had too many people in it.
And so it was more an act of.
Finding bodies to put into it than anything else.
And I even tried to get out.
Like when I went, when I showed up to the Creech Air Force Base, they told us that our job was to kill people and break things.
And I even went to my commander and was like, I didn't sign up to do this.
And he was like, Are you a fucking pussy?
Are you going to do their job?
Didn't you not swear in order to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic?
And I was like, Yeah.
And he's like, Well, then get out there and do your fucking job.
You know, and I was just an airman first class, I was the bottom of the totem pole, and this guy was a lieutenant colonel.
Who the am I to talk against this guy?
Right.
But if I was, if I had listened to my heart and if I had listened to the teachings of my grandfather, I would have been like, Yeah, you, I'm not gonna do this.
Uh, but that's that's not necessarily the case.
And when I look at back at my um time in the drones, I scored a 92 on my ASBAB, which is the military aptitude test.
Most of the people that I was with scored less than a 50.
So, the minimum to be in the drone program was a 45 on the test.
And so, really, what they wanted was bodies.
You know, they were ramping up the program.
They needed people to sit in the seat to do the job.
When I was in the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron, I was the first MAC qualified drone operator.
And MAC is multi aircraft control, where basically a drone operator flies the aircraft himself with the Just the assistance of a pilot.
And there were plenty of people that were in my squadron that could not do that job because they did not have the aptitude to monitor and take care of a plane by themselves.
And what kind of things were on this aptitude test?
Like, what qualities were they testing you for?
Recruiting Real Superheroes00:04:12
It's basically like reading comprehension, mechanical comprehension, linguistic comprehension.
There's four categories.
I can't remember the fourth category.
Is it true that they specifically look for gamers, like people who are professional video game players?
Maybe now, but that wasn't the case.
When.
Okay.
Bye.
When there was a lot of us that played video games when we were in the military, especially World of Warcraft, there was a whole bunch of us that played that together.
And you can definitely tell that there is a skill set that is directly involved with this program.
You know, the hand eye coordination, the ability to instantly recognize whatever button presses that you need to do in order to make the action happen.
It's not really that complicated, nothing near as complicated as playing World of Warcraft.
But there was definitely a skill set.
If you even just look at the stick control, it was like, If you were able to play Microsoft Flight Simulator with a joystick, you were able to do this.
And there were a lot of people that, you know, their stick control was really horrible, where they took the control stick and they would be like, bloop, Like, so the camera would go, like, so there was no, the camera didn't have the smooth controls on it, right?
And you could definitely tell the difference between someone who was put in the program.
And without any real skill versus someone who practiced that skill a long time.
Over in Europe, they are recruiting gamers for their own programs, like in Norway and England and the UK.
They are going to video game conferences, and I have had video feed videos given to me, and people who go to these conferences talk to me about this type of stuff and tell me what is going on.
I've not done that myself.
Though maybe I probably should at some point.
If you go over to, there are these weapons conventions, military technology conventions that happen, and they happen a lot over in Europe.
And that one of the guys that goes over there talks to these dudes and what they're recruiting and how they're saying, they'll talk to little kids.
They'll talk to little kids and be like, oh, do you play Call of Duty?
Even in the United States, like the recruiters will show up.
There's been a couple times in my own hometown where they'll show up with a semi truck and it'll be have like United States military on the back of it, and they'll be and inside will be seats for kids to play video games like Call of Duty.
And they'll be like, If you come talk to us for 15 minutes, we'll let you play Call of Duty for 30.
Right.
So they'll use those things to recruit and they'll say things like, You know, do you really want to be a real Superman?
Do you want to be a real hero?
Do you want to be, you know, All those types of propaganda nonsense that kids would be like, Yeah, I want to be a hero.
I want to do something good.
I want to fight for glory.
I want this.
Or they'll even go to gang, they'll even recruit gang members who are like, you know, who want the training, who want the experience just so that they can go back into the game.
For the most part, the people that I was with at the beginning were not that intelligent and they were just bodies put in the seat because they just needed someone to man the camera.
They hadn't developed the technology to do it automatically with artificial intelligence.
Minimal Procedure for Incapacitation00:05:26
So, when you first got into the program, what was your job?
Like, what kind of title did they give you?
And what specifically were you doing with the drones?
Were you flying them?
Were you shooting the missiles?
Like, what exactly were you doing?
So, I was a MQ1 Bravo Predator sensor operator, and that is just a glorified cameraman.
You know, I point the camera at the target.
The pilot will tell me to point the laser, which guides the missile to impact, and the pilot will pull the trigger so that the missile comes off the rail.
But I'm the one that guides the missile to the target.
About a month after I finished training, I was flying planes on my own.
I flew planes on my own for about eight months.
How long?
Eight months.
And that means with minimal pilot input.
So there's an officer pilot and an enlisted sensor operator, and I was the enlisted dude.
The reason why they have a pilot in the other seat is because pilots are JTAC qualified.
So they're qualified to drop ordinance with the approval of a joint tactical air controller on the ground who watches our video feed and confirms that that's what they want us to do.
And the JTAC is the guy who he basically knows what every single ordinance does and its impact radius, percent of incapacitation, which is like in order for us to fire within with friendlies on the ground, there must be a 0.1% of incapacitation, which for the Predator missile is 105.
What does that mean?
That means that there's 0.1% of loss of friendly life.
At 105 meters of impact.
Loss of friendly life.
Yeah.
Meaning US troops?
Yes.
So, like, if there were troops in the area, like a JTAC on the ground with a convoy, and the JTAC, even if we knew that they were within range of incapacitation, if the JTAC says, we are 106 meters away, right?
He is saying that we are one meter away from 0.1%.
Incapacitation, even if they're like 50 meters from it, sometimes the JTAC will be like, Yeah, fire a missile, uh, shoot these guys, we are 106 meters away, right?
And the official report will say that, even though they're probably less.
It's like the, you know, I shot multiple times, and the first time I killed three, the second time I killed two, and the second, everyone always brings up the second one because a child ran into the field of view, right?
Well, in the official report, they put that it was a dog, right?
Because that's essentially what they do.
They overwrite.
What actually happened with their version of events.
So, if civilians are in the way, you know, they'll call it collateral damage and they might not even give the correct numbers.
The only reason that people get the correct numbers is because we have cell phones on the ground now and people can be like, we lost this many people and post it to social media.
In 2014, I think there was an app on the Apple Store that every time a drone strike happened, it would mark it on a map and it would give you local phone numbers to call.
If there were people in the area.
And that was taken down.
So, you know, as technology increases for the least of us, the reporting gets more accurate, right?
And so these institutions can't falsely report things like, yeah, we killed two high valued individuals with minimal collateral damage.
Well, no, they can say, like, there were hundreds of people that were killed for you to get just these two individuals.
Right, right, and that can be personally reported by civilians on the ground.
Now, that the uh, this the shot that you said that you took where there was a dog reported can you, I guess, walk me through like the procedure of taking what you call a shot?
Yeah, so um, or that or that shot in particular?
Um, I'll actually do the first one because that one was.
Is one that's clearer in my mind, you know, what the procedure was.
And it's the procedure you train these procedures.
There's a checklist that you have to run.
There's, we have a safety observer who sits there and makes sure that we run the checklist and everything's within regulations and according to the rules of engagement and law of armed conflict.
So in the first one, I showed up to work and we have something called monthly currencies where like you have to take a shot once a month or run through the checklist to pretend that you're taking a shot.
Running the Safety Checklist00:15:01
All sorts of stuff.
Well, my currency had ran out, and they were like, All right, we're going to put you in the seat and make you do a real shot.
And I show up, get in the seat, and we run through the checklist procedures.
But what happened, this one was probably more interesting because there was a convoy that was in an engagement with Taliban troops, and they were firing from the top of a hill underneath this tree.
And they had the person that was in the seat before me.
Had set everything up to take the shot.
So I get in the seat after this guy, and we're getting ready to take the shot.
And we get a call from the JTAC that says that the missile impact would have less of a result than what we want from the Hellfire missile.
So we're going to have the F 16s that are in the area drop a GBU, a ground.
Guided bombing, which would have a bigger impact.
And so, as we're monitoring this conflict going down, the F 16 gets in contact with us and says, We found three people 10 clicks to the south by southwest.
Put your eyes on this location.
So, we move our video feed to this location and we see these three individuals walking down the road.
And they can definitely hear this fight going on.
Like, there's bombs exploding, guns going off, grenades, all sorts of stuff.
And they look terrified.
Like, they look like they're.
You know, they're walking.
It's probably, let's see, it was probably really early in the morning, maybe like five o'clock, six o'clock in the morning.
So it's so dark.
Yeah.
And so there were three individuals, two of them were walking and talking together, and you could see their hand movements and all these types of things.
And the third person in the back was lagging behind, and he was, he could probably hear the F 16s in the area.
He was probably listening.
And So, as soon as we put eyes on these guys, the screener, who is the intelligence dude who was my job originally, that was the job I trained for, is watching this video feed and confirming what's on the video feed.
And he says, We got three individuals with weapons.
And the JTAC says, Confirm weapons, you are cleared hot.
And cleared hot means you are cleared to engage these individuals at your discretion.
And so the pilot gives a two minute call saying that we'll be ready in two minutes to pull the trigger.
We run through the checklist, we power up the missile.
We point the laser, and the JTAC says point the miss the laser between the two feet of the individuals in the front because we'd rather get two than three.
So, point the laser, and if I'm going to give a little background information of my emotional state at this time.
So, my very first mission, I saw a convoy hit an ID, and I heard there's cries over the radio for medical help, and basically all we could do was sit there and watch them.
So, I had this programmed hate into me.
I watched our own guys die, people on our own team die.
I want to fucking kill these guys.
I want them to die.
I want them to suffer the consequences for hurting us.
And there's a difference between killing out of survival and killing out of conflict and killing out of hate because of an ideology.
And when we.
When I was so laser focused on these guys, and I wasn't really actually sure if I was able to do it, even though I felt all this emotional turmoil inside of me.
When the missile finally impacted and hit, the missile comes off the rail, and 1.5 seconds, 1.3 seconds after it comes off the rail, it hits the sound barrier.
So it sonic booms.
But because the missile takes so long to get to target, the kinetic energy of the missile slows down that the sonic boom hits the target.
About four to six seconds before impact.
So the guy that was behind everyone else heard the sonic boom and runs towards the other two, and we ended up getting all three.
Right?
So the first two people were in pieces.
I mean, you could see the body parts everywhere.
And the third guy had his leg, his right leg cut off right above the knee, and I watched him bleed out.
And that was, you know, when you hurt someone, I've never hurt, before that, I never hurt anyone, even though I was a wrestler.
I never, I got into a couple fights in high school, but I never hurt someone, right?
I just defended myself.
This didn't feel like defending myself.
This felt like straight up murder.
Like, I watched the guy, the guy bled out.
He was rolling around on the ground.
I can only just imagine what he was thinking, right?
Like, he knew he was dying.
Like, you can tell he's like rolling on the ground, holding his leg.
And the people on the watching our video feed were like, keep eyes on.
We just want to see if anyone comes up and picks up the body parts.
And so I kept my camera on it and we watched this guy in infrared turn from.
A hot blob with his blood squirting out of his leg, go pulling underneath him, and we watched them cool down enough so that they became, um, uh, no different from the ground that they they died on.
And it was a January, so uh, actually, uh, what date what's the date today is 20th.
Okay, so six days will be my 15th year anniversary, uh, 16 year and 14 year anniversary from when I snow 15 years, holy shit, 2021.
Yes, it'll be 15 years since my first Hellfire missile shot.
Jesus.
And I remember it as clear as if it happened yesterday.
And you never really think that you can do it until it happens.
And after it happened, I was devastated.
I was in shock.
I felt like I just did something that I had no right to do.
I took another human being's life.
In such a gross way.
Like, they had no way to fight back.
They had no way to, I didn't look them in the eye.
I didn't know who they were.
I didn't see their face.
We just ended their life.
And I watched a guy slowly drain his life out.
And afterwards, I left.
Like, I left when people were celebrating.
In my squadron, people were like high fiving themselves as if they're like, yeah, we're winning the war on terror.
Yeah, high five.
Yeah, congratulations.
But I felt nothing but sickness in me.
And I left.
And as I was driving, I drove off base and I called my mother and I cried to her.
And I, as a young man, like I cried and I was like, I can't believe I did this.
I can't believe that I did it.
I felt so sick.
And I called her after every shot to tell her this.
And the advice that she gave me was, you know, I know that it's a horrible thing, but your being there and feeling bad about it is a good thing because it means that you'll make sure that.
The wrong people don't need to die.
The wrong people aren't going to be killed.
But as I look back on, as I reflect on my time in the military, I'm not sure if there was a right person.
You know, we caused this whole mess.
Like, even there was one time I was in what they call the Predator Operations Center, which is similar to what they show on in movies and stuff, where there's all these video screens in this command center with all these feeds going on.
And there was one time.
In downtown Baghdad, that I watched a dude pull out two little girls from the back of his vehicle, the trunk, and execute them in the middle of the street and drive off.
And he did it because he was like, the US can't touch me.
Like, no one can touch me.
And he did it as a statement.
In Afghanistan, I watched a guy, a mayor, a village elder who led his village be kidnapped by known members of the Taliban and executed as well.
And even these guys, like, the guy was executed for not cooperating with them and for cooperating with the enemy, right?
We were the enemy.
And so, even when I look at them, like I feel like that's our fault.
You know, we caused this conflict.
We caused this strife.
We weren't going over there to bring peace.
We were going over there to bring a sword, right?
We were doing this in such an unhealthy way.
And no matter what I look back at, I don't feel like we were noble.
You know, we didn't do it good and right.
And in my second shot, when the child, Ran into the field of view.
Like, I remember my supervisor.
So it was called out on screen that a dog, that was a dog that was on the field of view.
I asked my pipe.
How did that whole second shot start?
Like, how did that whole mission or that whole operation specifically begin?
So, usually, you know, things when the shots happen, it's not like an immediate thing.
Usually, there's the buildup.
They'd been following.
Two high valued individuals, and they had thought that they were in this farmhouse and they had been monitoring traffic in and out of this farmhouse.
And eventually, they thought that, well, the two guys that we're looking for are in there.
So we're just going to take the shot.
And that had been that decision had been made before I sat in the seat.
And so when I had come to sit in the seat, I didn't know about that decision.
Right.
So I had just been, you know, it had been.
The guy before me had been watching this for eight hours.
The guy before him had been watching it for eight hours and then launched the aircraft to this mission.
And I had just thought, well, I'm just going to be the guy that just watches this mission.
I thought that usually they're going to act when they say that they're going to action a place, it's going to send a group of rangers in there to capture these dudes and figure out what they're doing.
And so when they finally made the decision to shoot, it was more like, well, we don't want to send anyone in there.
We're just going to shoot these guys.
And While I had, you know, I had been feeling quite loathsome of myself, I thought that, you know, I'm in this position, I might as well follow through.
And so it was an L shaped building and everything was going down, and, you know, it was typical run the checklist, point the, we estimate that they're probably in this area of the building.
Building, point your crosshairs at this corner, turn on the laser, and that was it, right?
And I'm sitting there just mindless.
And I had a lot of drama going on with my peers.
Like, my peers were really dumb and stuck in high school.
So, like I said before, one of the problems is there's no discipline in the drone program, is because they take a lot of high school kids who still stuck in high school.
The drama.
How old were you at the time?
19.
Actually, I was 20.
I turned 20 in November before that.
And my second shot happened right, either right before or right after Valentine's Day.
I kind of get confused, but it was at that point in time.
And this girl that I had dated in the squadron, if I were to give any advice to people in the military, never date anyone in your squadron.
It just causes a whole bunch of problems.
And this girl was causing problems for me.
I broke up with her and she wanted to sleep around and she was saying things, really nasty things about me.
I tried to apologize to her.
I tried to make right with her.
My grandfather had just been, he's like, just be kind to her.
And she just caused more and more drama.
And so I was feeling all that as well.
And when the, so we're sitting there on this building and they give us the order to shoot.
And again, you know, these people over there, they hear the sonic boom, the missile impact, they know what's going on.
So I think that this person who, The child who ran into the building was told that if you ever hear something like this, run into shelter.
Right.
And that was probably the closest shelter building that they had.
Right.
And if it was early in the morning, like most of the shots happen, that person was probably taking care of their animals because there was a little barn that had a couple of sheep and goats or whatever in it and maybe a few cows.
And this person could have been taking care of doing the early morning chores.
And here's this.
Sonic boom go off and run to the building.
So, you saw this small person or child run into the building after you pulled the trigger?
Yeah, after we pulled the trigger and about six seconds before impact.
And it was probably even sooner than that.
It just seems like the time goes off, but the sonic boom, whatever it was, hit this area first and the person ran into the building.
Or was I'm not even sure if they got into the building.
They were just.
Running into it as the missile struck.
And so, like, I was devastated.
When I went to my supervisor, I was like, Look, man, this is not right.
Like, and he's like, Send me an email about it.
Top Secret Clearance Issues00:15:02
Just, you know, just ignore it.
Just, you know, go with the official report.
And I was, you know, they teach us one of the core values of the Air Force is integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all we do.
And in that regard, we failed.
There was no integrity in what we were doing.
There was no excellence and there was no service.
You know, service to greed, service to violence is maybe the best I can come up with.
And I reviewed the tapes, I reviewed the feed, and everyone basically told me to just shut the fuck up.
You know, shut the fuck up.
We don't want to hear it.
And so I did.
You know, I bitched a lot while I was in, but that was because I was the best at what I did.
You know, I would tell people that were being wasted, that were being used, that this is a waste of time.
But so, what they did, they just made me work more.
It just put me in a GCS and made me do the job more.
And it was really devastating to me.
It crushed me.
With all the drama that was happening behind the scenes, it killed me.
It really killed who I believed that I could be.
It killed the dream that I had for.
For who I wanted.
One second, I'm going to shut the door.
Okay.
And I keep trying to tell people this, and it's like I'm speaking to deaf ears, right?
When I remember when I first got out of the military, I started hanging out.
I met a Vietnam veteran who recognized the signs within me, and he's like, You need to go to therapy about this.
But I had a top secret clearance at the time, and I knew.
That going to therapy puts your top secret clearance in jeopardy.
Actually, I think I still have my top secret clearance now that I think about it.
How do you still have a top secret clearance?
Because I got it renewed right before I got injured and it's been renewed for 10 years.
And it hasn't been 10 years.
Actually, it'll be 10 years.
And how did you get injured?
I have a traumatic brain injury.
I had a 170 pound log, it dropped on me during a training exercise.
Oh.
Broke my skull in two places and compressed my spine and bounced off my shoulder.
I tried to catch it, which was probably the worst idea that I could have had, but I thought I was tough.
And so, I mean, then that was actually the reason why I blew the whistle, was because I was on my deathbed and I was facing the consequences of a tarnished soul.
And I wanted to, the whistleblowing was essentially my deathbed confession.
If we want to look at my wrestler background, what is a whistleblower?
You know, it's a referee, someone who says, time out, you know, we're doing the wrong thing.
And I had a lot of compassion for people in the drone program.
Like I knew that I knew what they were doing and what they were going through and the sickness that was happening.
But after I came out, And started speaking, it was like my entire, everyone turned on me, you know, in the worst fashion.
Like, you know, I have a stalker, you know, now his name's Rick Ryan Nearson.
He has this blog who talks, he says all sorts of shit about me.
He's in his blog, he calls me, he says that I'm part of a death cult who used the powers of the people that the souls of the people I killed to give myself supernatural powers, stuff like that, all sorts of weird shit.
And this guy was, he claims to be, have come from the program.
And they say all sorts of shit.
My call sign in the military was church because I was a good church kid.
And I'm no longer religious.
In fact, I disdain religion above all things.
I think that it leads people astray more than it leads people to flight.
And even in the military, they say that we're doing this for God and country.
When I was in the third SOS, they made me go see a chaplain because I couldn't see a therapist.
Due to my clearance, and the chaplain was like, God wants you to feel this way.
God wants you to kill these people, and it's all right.
And like, they were trying to use my own religion against me.
When my grand, my great grandfather was a minister for his whole life, and my grandfather was the one who raised me.
And he would totally have been, you know, I didn't get to confess to him anything before he died, before he passed away.
But I know for a fact my grandfather would have been like, This isn't.
This isn't the God that I told you about.
It's so crazy to think that the greatest superpower in the world of the United States has 19 year old high school students flying around shooting hellfire missiles at apartment buildings or into wedding parties, weddings, funerals, you name it.
You name it, we've done it.
Dude, it's mind blowing to think about that.
Yeah.
It's the reality.
And it's strange to see all the media.
Like, one of the reasons, so a big reason, this is kind of a serendipitous moment, but when I was in, so my injury happened when I was in training for survival.
I was going to be a survival teacher, you know.
I didn't want to be a guy on the ground because I knew the shit they went through, but I wanted to be someone that taught people how to survive in these scenarios, right?
And when I was in training, when I was in breakfast one day, They would always have the news on, whether it was MSNBC or CNN or Fox News.
They usually had one of each.
And Obama, there were civilians, was it civilians or friendlies were killed?
An accident happened with the drones and it was being reported.
And President Obama himself was saying that it was the operator's fault that this happened, not the intelligence, not the military.
And I was like, oh, motherfucker, I voted for you and you just.
You just straight up lied and threw the entire drone community under the bus.
And that was actually one of the ideas that I had to redeem my own group of people because we're just instruments, right?
We're just basically tools for the military to do this job.
We have no say.
And they don't even tell us who it is that we're killing.
They're just like, this guy's a bad guy.
We're looking for nefarious activity.
We want you to shoot him.
This is what we've determined.
And it just really infuriated me that, you know, they were blaming us for their poor decisions, you know, for their mistakes.
They weren't taking responsibility.
And there was a, I could speak about the military leadership and how they were very poor.
The military leadership that was in the program, they didn't fly.
Most of them were people that were rejects from other squadrons.
About six months after.
My first shot, January, February, March, April, May, five months after my first shot, they did something called a patch swap, which shoved the majority of the people into Joint Special Operations Command.
But a lot of these people that were in military leadership didn't actually do the job.
They were trained to do it.
They would come in, they would do their currencies once a month, and they would get flight pay.
And that's a, it was like basically double their income, and they wouldn't even be flying.
And people like me, Who we didn't get flight pay.
I was flying, I was probably flying six days a week, 12 hour shifts, and I never once got paid or compensated for it.
You know, and there are these people that would fly who were in, you know, they'd go to parties and they'd do all these kinds of stuff.
If you were part of the good old boys' club, you didn't have to fly very much and you can go and volunteer and pad your enlisted performance report and all sorts of stuff.
They would totally discard what was happening.
Overseas, and what we were participating in, so they could be politically and socially set.
And that was a really poor environment.
And a lot of the pilots, so there was at one point a three star admiral came in and was like, We want to get the Navy involved in this and send you guys people to train up.
And we want our own drones.
And I want to talk to your leadership about this.
And we sent them a captain, a staff sergeant, and a senior airman.
And the guy was like, Where are your senior leadership?
Where's your upper echelon leadership?
And we were like, Well, these guys know the most.
They've been in the program the longest since it was in prototype.
The guy was like, Oh, yeah, this is unsatisfactory.
Went to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Air Force and said, We need to put bodies, hiring enlisted and officers into these positions.
And so they sent out this missive to the entire military that was like, We need people for the drone program.
Well, they didn't.
No one joins the military to fly remote controlled aircraft.
Like, pilots don't join the military to sit in a box.
To fly remote control, they want to be in the air, they want to be in their machine, and they want to feel it because it gets them off.
Um, and so the people who were responding to this were like, Yeah, this is a joke.
They sent us all their rejects.
My, um, my first supervisor was a cop reject because no one could stand him, everyone hated him in his prior.
Squadron.
And so they sent him to us, and as a way, well, it's a cross training opportunity for you to expand your military career and to get promoted.
He ended up getting master sergeant because of it, basically just giving it to him.
He was a good tester, but he was a terrible human being.
And most of the people were like that.
The pilots that were given to us were rejects from their squadrons.
They couldn't make flight lead, they couldn't make flight command.
They were one of the pilots that I was that I loved to death was he was a B 52 guy and he would get air sick.
So, because he couldn't stay in the air, they sent him to drones.
There was another pilot that I loved who was my commander in Iraq.
And he, the reason he was an F 16 pilot and the reason he was no longer an F 16 pilot was because his eyes were going.
And he didn't want to get out of the military, forced retirement.
So he became a drone operator, right?
So we had a lot of these guys with medical problems, and there's a couple of good dudes with behavioral problems as well.
They spend millions of dollars to train these guys, and then they don't want to get rid of them because if they kick them out of the military, these guys either go to jail or spend the rest of their lives.
Oh, shit.
Oh, my.
What happened?
Your computer fell.
Yeah, my little desk thing is.
Oh, oh.
All good.
Lay down, bud.
Lay down, You know, and they send, they just, these guys that had behavioral problems, they, after I, I'll use an example for one of them.
This guy's, when I started blowing the whistle a couple of years ago, his ex girlfriend called me up and was like, I need you to reach out to this dude because one of the pilots that you were with, Is now like he's in jail, he's drinking, he's gambling, got gambling problems, he's no longer in, he just fucking lost it.
Like he got out and was like, he just lost his shit.
One of the women pilots that I was friends with, when we were flying, like we would complain.
Like, her and I would be like, This fucking sucks.
This is, you know, she was a heavy pilot.
So she was a transport and she was like, I love flying.
Like, that was my dream.
And now I'm sitting here murdering people and hunting people down.
Like, this is a nightmare.
And at one point, she was flying a training mission, a local sortie, and she ran the aircraft off the runway.
She had a mental breakdown when the aircraft was coming off the runway, didn't pull up, and the aircraft just went off the runway.
Right?
Jeez.
So a lot of these people would just have mental breakdowns because we weren't getting the support that we needed.
How far do you guys take off?
How far do the drones fly?
Where are they based out of?
So they're based in country, and they can fly for up to 17 to 32 hours, depending on missile loadout.
The reason I say 32 hours is because I was part of the longest Predator mission at the time.
I launched the aircraft, no missiles, max fuel, no even Intel pod to gather information.
It was just empty load, max fuel.
I launched the aircraft, came back 24 hours, did an eight hour mission later, and landed the aircraft in the final mission, in the final hours of it.
So, 17 hours is probably a good estimate if it's a full loadout.
And they have a eight.
Maverick Mistakes and Debriefs00:08:13
Usually, the ceiling is between in Afghanistan, it's 18 to 25,000 feet, and in Iraq, it's 11,000 to 15,000 feet above sea level.
And where were you physically based during all this?
I was in for the first part of my career, I was stationed in Las Vegas at Nellis Air Force Base, had training at Creech Air Force Base, which is 40 minutes north of Vegas, and then I was moved to.
The drama with the girl that I dated in the military forced me to be stationed over in New Mexico.
Okay.
So I was, the last part of my career, I was with the third SOS down in Cannon Air Force Base, which is in Clovis, New Mexico.
Weren't you in there at one point?
I was over in Iraq for six months.
Six months.
Yeah, 2007.
And that's where you saw the thing with the guy that pulled up in his car and executed two girls?
No, actually, that was so a lot of.
Strangely enough, most of the action that happened was when I was in Nellis Air Force Base.
The description that I like to use, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone use it before, is it was like the Wild West.
You know, when we were in Nellis, we had very little rules governing us other than the law of armed conflict and the rules of engagement.
And so it was very much like if we were in the area and there was something happening, people would.
Call us up and be like, hey, we need your missile, we need your eyes, we need you to do this.
The first, and I got so I graduated on my birthday, 18 November in 2006, from training.
And then my first mission was December 4th.
And there's an end of the year report that we have at our Christmas meeting or Christmas parties.
And they said that 200 and I want to say 212, but I don't think that's right.
200 plus shots were fired over the course of the last year in just the 15th reconnaissance alone.
So, over the course of the next six months, I witnessed that happen.
Like, pretty much every day that I would go in, there was a shot to be recorded.
Like, it was debriefed.
It was briefed with us every brief and debriefed every debrief, right?
And the shots were always shown to us, everyone got to see them.
If on my lunch break, there was a 7 Eleven that was across the street next to a Popeye, not Popeye's, Jack in the Box, and my buddies and I would take the squadron van and go and get lunch and then bring it back and we would sit in the Predator Operations Center and watch missions that were happening.
Now we would be sitting there with Slurpees and fucking corndogs and watching this shit happen.
When I was in the third SOS, we went from basically 200 shots plus a year with the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron to the 3rd SOS to maybe less than 10 shots a year.
Right?
Because I actually respected the Joint Special Operations mission more than I respected the conventional Porsche's mission because they were, in my understanding, they were actually hunting the dudes that were high up individuals and trying to not let this conflict go out of control.
But eventually, the same corruption that the 15th was dealing with made its way over into joint special forces because you can't have a group of secrecy operating at that level without corruption eventually taking over.
But the difference is staggering.
I spent more hours just sitting there watching marketplaces and what they call patterns of life with the 3rd SOS than I did with the 15th.
After all these shots, you said they were like debriefed.
Was there ever a record or was there always a record of potential civilian casualties with every single one of these shots?
No.
In fact, from what I can remember, the collateral damage was never mentioned.
Never.
Not even thought of.
No.
It was like, yeah, we got these individuals.
A funny thing here's a little funny story.
So, pilots are very particular.
As much as I hate, Especially fighter pilots, their egocentric personalities, they've got a lot of quirky traits.
And one of the funny things is that a pilot, after every action, there has to be something called an after action report.
And when I first joined the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron, we had so few people that usually it would be the same pilots doing the shots more often than not.
And they would write novels.
Like it was like, Watching someone writing the next script for the next Top Gun.
It was like, I was in the seat and I was doing this and we were watching this action happen.
And they would go into so much detail of things that were going on that eventually, because leadership has to read every report, they would be like, keep the report to a paragraph, you know, six to eight sentences.
That's it.
So, and then it became, after that order came down, it went.
From being everything reported as what's going on to being like, you know, not even complete sentences.
It'd be like missile came off the rail, missile impacted, missile took out two individuals that were labeled as high profile individuals, mission accomplished, stuff like that.
So it wasn't even like I remember reading one report, and the pilot was like, I was sitting there drinking my coffee, and we got the call from the JTAC to power up our missile.
It was just like this thriller that they wanted to write, right?
They wanted to be a part of it.
I actually knew a pilot who got out and went to Hollywood because he wanted to write.
He was so inundated in the Top Gun world that he wanted to write a Top Gun script for Drones.
Really?
Yeah.
It's fascinating.
I'm actually curious about this new Top Gun movie coming out because I hear that there's drones.
I didn't even know there was a new Top Gun movie coming out.
Supposed to come out this year, but it's coming out, or last year, but it's coming out this year.
Really?
Yeah, Top Gun 2, Tom Cruise and everything.
No, they're not doing Tom Cruise again, are they?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
If I ever had the chance, I would actually like to get a conversation with that guy because there's so many people and so many pilots that just reference Top Gun and him and Maverick and the drones.
Like they wanted to be Maverick.
Like I have more respect for Iceman because Iceman was professional.
You know, it was Maverick's mistake that got Goose killed.
Right.
Right.
And so, and Iceman was, he's not a bad guy.
He was just a strictly disciplined dude.
And so many of the pilots that were in the drones were rejects because, but they felt because of that, they felt like they didn't belong in the normal group.
They were the Maverick.
My stalker, Rick Reineerson, wants to be Maverick.
He wants to be Maverick.
In fact, he calls him, he labels himself as Django from Django and Chain.
Like he wants to be Django.
Like he has this idea of this egocentric, great personality that he wants to be, but essentially they're just wannabes.
Rejecting Squadrons Like Mavericks00:09:09
Yeah, well, like we were talking about earlier, kind of gives them a story, kind of gives them some sort of meaning or purpose, right?
I feel like everywhere you hear about drone strikes or you hear about these drone operations and the massive civilian casualties, it's always synonymous with Yemen.
Why is Yemen and drone strikes so synonymous?
Mostly because we shouldn't even be over there.
And Yemen is a humanitarian crisis going on right now.
Like there is, the children are starving, entire places are being devastated.
And the excuse that was given to me was that their government requested us to help them out.
So when I was in the third SOS, the end of my enlistment, I was a part of an operation to track down and hunt.
Anwar al-Awlaki, who was an Islamic imam, a holy man.
This guy, when 9-11 happened, was invited to the White House by the Bush administration and was even friends with the Obama administration.
Like, went to the White House and was like, yeah, we need to be over there.
There are, you know, radical Islam is not Islam.
Where's this guy originally from, Anwar al-Awlaki?
For people who don't know his full story, like, what?
He's from Yemen.
Okay.
But he was a United States citizen and lived in Colorado.
I think Colorado Springs, actually, if we want to be specific.
And his son, Abdullah Rahman, lived here too.
Right.
And so when Anwar al Alaki was invited, he, you know, being a celebrity in his religion, he was invited to go to mosques all over the world.
And he, especially, of course, any compassionate religious figure would go and help his people, regardless.
Like, one of my favorite phrases is from the Bhagavad Gita when Lord Krishna is talking to Arjun and he's saying, he's like, Anyone can come to me, whether they be good or evil, and I will give them fair judgment, right?
And I think that you know, my grandfather was the same way like, if anyone came to him, regardless of whether they were the worst scum in the world or the noblest of saints, he would still talk to them as if they, you know, they're still human.
And so, uh, Anwar went to the mosque, and of course, there were people that were opposed to what the U.S. government was doing over there coming and talking to them, and he was giving them advice.
We don't know what advice he was, I wasn't.
Told what advice, but we got video of him talking to known members of I think Hamas, and just that alone right there was enough for people to be like, Okay, we should kill him.
But then he was like, He saw the devastation that was happening in Yemen, he saw what we were doing and what was going on.
He was like, The United States is wrong, the United States is wrong in this, and you know what they decided to do?
We kill him right before anywhere.
Sorry to interrupt, but I feel like anywhere.
You are, whether you're in the United States, Africa, Yemen, if you see an exorbitant amount of innocent people being slaughtered for no reason, you're going to feel extremely passionate about or extreme.
You're going to feel compassion.
Compassion andor resentment for whoever is doing that, whoever's responsible for that.
Yeah.
And I remember that.
My leadership was, you know, every brief that we'd have, they'd be like, This guy deserves to die.
He's a traitor to the United States, blah, But, um, no one really, you know, one of the first times I actually ever read the Constitution was at the end of my enlistment.
You know, we're taught we swear an oath to this thing, yet we don't have to understand it or know it.
No one teaches us, they just like, Do you swear to uphold the Constitution?
Right.
Everyone talks about it.
Yeah.
Um, gotta protect it.
That's all we know.
Yeah.
Right.
Um, And so I remember coming in on one day, and one of the pilots, I'm going to just name him and I hope he forgives me, but I respect this guy a lot.
His name was Chris Ayers.
He was a major in the Air Force.
And him and I had a game going on wherever he was briefing, I would go in and I would change one of his slides to say something silly or stupid, or I would like copy one of the slides like 10 times so that when you clicked the button, it would go to the same slide.
So him and I would.
Play these games to just entertain ourselves.
And I remember coming in one day and he looked like he was like this.
He was like, oh my God, like he looked sick.
And I go up and I was like, hey, sir, what's going on?
Like, what's up?
And he was like, we're now going to be flying armed in Yemen when previously we weren't.
You know, the episode that I said that I flew the longest mission, that was a Yemen mission.
And it was we were flying unarmed with no SIGINT pod because we were just doing visual.
And it was February of 2011.
And he's just like, yeah, we're flying armed now.
And if we are given the order to kill Anwar al Alaki, President Obama himself will call up the GCS ground control station and give the order.
And I was like, awesome.
Like, we're going to kill this guy.
Like, it's probably going to be me, right?
Like, I'm probably going to be the dude that's going to do it.
It's one.
There were three of us.
There were three crews that flew this mission because it was so high profile.
What did you guys know about Anwar al Alaki at that time?
Nothing.
Like, we just knew that he was a traitor.
I didn't look him up.
I didn't know anything.
I was just.
Doing what I was told, right?
I didn't watch the news or do any of that type of stuff because it just, I knew from what they were reporting versus what we were doing, I knew that they were reporting back, right?
And I was like, I was like, all right, we're finally going to get this mission done.
So what's the problem?
And he looks at me and he's like, church, don't you understand that our constitution says that even a traitor deserves a fair and free trial?
In front of a jury of his peers, we're violating, we're violating, we're violating everything that I swore to do.
And I was kind of like, whoa, really?
And he's like, yeah.
He's like, this is wrong.
And I remember, so we have to build a mission profile, a mission folder before every launch.
And as I was usually the person that launched the aircraft, I was the one that was making this folder.
So I'm sitting at the computer and I'm putting it together.
I'm putting the dossier together.
And I get this sense of, I'm standing at the printer and I get this sense of vertigo.
Like, I'm thinking to myself, yeah, I'm probably going to be the one to kill this guy.
I want the, like, if Obama, like, I voted Obama into office, right?
Like, I voted this guy.
I'm going to get an order from the president of the United States, the guy who I voted into office.
Like, I just had the, it was like this euphoria.
And then I remembered my first shot.
I had forgotten about it.
And I remember what my mom said.
And my mom said that, you know, as soon as you want to do it, that means that you are no longer capable of carrying the responsibility of doing it right.
And I don't know if you've heard of a book series called The Wheel of Time.
That's one of my favorite book series.
I've read it five times.
And it's a super long series, but there's one point one of the characters gets an axe and he's this young boy and he's like, Practicing with it in the woods, and he wants to use it.
He wants to be this hero.
And he ends up killing some other men and getting sick, like just horribly sick from it.
And his mentor comes up and he says, He's like, It's good that you feel this way.
You know, as soon as you want to do it, then you must throw that axe away and rock the other way.
And my mom said the same thing in different words, you know, like right after I had done it.
And so, like, I had this echo, like, these series that I had loved so much, and my mom's words and my grandfather's teachings just echoed within me.
And I had this sense of vertigo that I was doing the wrong thing.
Tracked Conversations and Radicalization00:07:00
And I was like, I can't stay in.
I was thinking about maybe re enlisting.
I was thinking about, like, had I re enlisted, they were going to make me an MQ 9 Reaper operator.
I was going to get sent down to White Sands.
And then I was like, I can't do this.
I can't.
Be a part of this anymore.
And right before I got out, it could have been like right before I got out or right after.
No, it was right after.
So I left early.
I got terminal leave, 84 days of terminal leave.
And in April of that year, they had their first attempt to capture Anwar al Alaki and they failed.
The helicopter that was going after them had a critical malfunction and crashed in the middle of the desert.
And I think it killed five Marines.
So then they were like, yeah, we're just going to kill them.
And I had people keeping me updated.
And then later that year, Anwar al Alaki was killed.
And then his son Abdullah Rahman was killed two weeks later.
Well, I find out that Abdullah Rahman, what had happened was as soon as Anwar al-Laqi started speaking out against the US government, they took his passport away and trapped him in Yemen.
He couldn't come back, which he intended to.
He intended to come back and go to Washington and make a stink and being like, this is wrong.
You must stop this.
Well, instead, he had power, right?
He was basically the Islamic Martin Luther King.
Right, he wasn't trying to incite violence, he was saying that the United States was wrong doing uh, and then uh, he became more.
Once they took his passport away, he became radicalized.
And then his son, who ran away from home to find his father, went to Yemen, uh, was killed in a drone strike because the United States didn't want him to become an icon.
Like, wasn't Anwar doing some crazy like praising the guys who flew the planes into the towers on 9 11 and and I don't know about that.
I just know that once his passport was taken from him by the United States and he was hunted down, he became radicalized.
And whatever he said from that, he was just super fucking pissed.
And his emotional state, I'm not excusing what he was saying.
I'm saying that his emotional state pushed him into a death.
He saw the suffering and he took it as his own and he did what he believed was right, even if it was wrong.
And one of the things that people don't know about the Trump administration is that Anwar's daughter was also in Yemen at the beginning of Trump's administration, and he ordered them to kill her because they didn't want her to become an icon either.
So Trump gave the order to kill an eight year old girl.
And that went through?
Yeah, it went through.
The Yemeni crisis is wrong.
All fronts.
And I don't know what they're searching for over there.
I don't know what resources or the destabilization or whatever.
But if we even go back to Sun Tzu's The Art of War, the way that you win a war is not through violence.
The way that you win a war is by getting the people on your side.
And the way that you get the people on your side is not by inciting violence, but by giving them the resources that they need to live a normal life.
Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.
Not everyone wants to be a rich CEO.
Not everyone wants a golden fucking toilet seat.
People just want to live their lives free and happy.
And what we're doing over in the Middle East is causing the opposite of that.
And even when we look at our own home, we're doing that as well.
If we look at the Black Lives Matter movement, the same operations that were being done over the Middle East, the signals intelligence, the following, they were flying drones over armed drones over U.S. cities.
Following these Black Lives Matter people.
Do you know Chris Dorner?
Have you ever heard of him?
No.
So, Chris Dorner was a radicalized police officer in LA who, a black man, who was seeing all the corruption going on and took a stand against the police, and they fired him.
And so then he started killing corrupt cops.
Oh, I have heard this story.
So, they found him in a cabin in the woods.
And if you listen to the radio, the whole radio sequence that plays out was a fabrication, it was all an act.
They said that they burned the cabin down with gasoline and everything, right?
Well, what actually happened was they shot a fucking Hellfire missile, killed.
So he was killed on American soil by the California Guard with a Hellfire missile.
How do you know this?
Because I know people that were in the California Guard.
So this isn't public knowledge.
No.
But those same tactics.
That was the first, I think that that was the first person killed with a Hellfire missile on US soil.
But they were in the protests that were happening all over the United States.
The California Guard, the Texas Guard, the Syracuse Guard were all flying drones.
There's Guard bases all over the United States that do this, and they all have their own drones on the base, and they do fly them for practice over the local area.
So it's no stretch of the imagination to say that, well, for practice, we're just going to actually do mission operations.
Over in the United States.
And these drones were armed?
Yeah, they're armed.
So, you know, all these people are worried about being tracked on their phones and stuff.
You know, everyone's being tracked.
Everything is being monitored.
What we're, our conversation right now is being monitored right now.
Our conversation is being tracked and disseminated, and people are doing these types of things.
You know, there's nothing that you can say or do that is going to escape the attention of these people who have developed this technology.
The thing that is advantageous to most people is that they have an algorithm monitoring them, not actual people.
I have actual people monitoring my shit.
Meaning who specifically?
I don't know.
Government agencies.
I have people interfering with my own personal life all the time.
Everyone Is Being Monitored00:07:08
I have people with all the stuff that I'm having with my local community, the police follow me every time I leave my house.
And I've got a.
That's an important thing I think we should bring up.
The reason that we're not sitting together right now doing this podcast is because you're not allowed to leave the state.
Yeah.
So, the story behind that is my mayor and city council are fraud, waste, and abuse of government resources, taxpayer money.
They're doing something called using something called tax increment financing, which, if you look into it, it's taking possible future taxes and Using that money now and then increasing the taxes to pay it back later.
Well, they've been giving money to out of state developers and people coming in from out of state.
There's a guy from Wisconsin named Nick Jacotta whose father made money by selling faulty medical equipment and then was exiled from Wisconsin while running for Congress because he was so corrupt.
He's here in Missoula and he wants to be this music mogul.
He wants to make Missoula some sort of music.
Venue place.
And the city council was going to give him $17 million in tax money to build a failed business that was going to be under his control for 70 years, and we were going to pay it back after 70 years.
Well, also, we've got a bank called Stockman's Bank that was given $4.4 million in tax money to build their building, and the first Interstate Bank of Montana was given $1.5 million of.
Taxpayer money to build their bank when they could have done it themselves, right?
The whole point of being a business person is to make those investments and build the business yourself.
And it's increased.
The cost of living in Missoula has skyrocketed since Engen has become mayor.
And there are 120 plus houses on the market, and only 17 of them are below.
Sorry, you broke up for that last part.
What did you say?
There are 17 houses that are below.
A million dollars on the market right now in my own hometown, and the median income in Missoula is less than forty thousand dollars.
Whoa!
So I yelled at the mayor for basically stealing money and giving it to the wealthy, like the sheriff of Nottingham.
And they put me in jail for a month.
So, uh, how did you yell at the mayor?
Where were you?
How city?
I was just at a city council meeting, okay.
And I told him, so I told him the story.
I don't know, so I make a lot of biblical references because I was trained in the biblical mythology.
But King David is my favorite biblical character.
And King David is the man who's called a man after God's own heart, the only one in the Bible, in fact, called that.
And he was an adulterer, a liar, a scoundrel, but he was king.
And the reason why he was called a man after God's own heart, because he was repentant.
And the prophet Nathan, who was the prophet during that time, Came into David and told the story.
He says, There was once a rich man with 99 sheep and a poor man with one.
And the rich man was having guests come over to his house.
So he goes out to his land and sees his 99 sheep.
But he sees that the poor man's one sheep is greater than all of his 99.
So he takes the poor man's sheep and serves him up to his guest and leaves the poor man destitute with nothing.
And I was like, Do you guys understand this?
And I'd been going to the city council meetings for about two months at that time.
And they didn't listen.
They were all bought off.
They were all there for a popularity contest.
They fucked up Missoula.
Like they literally have fucked up Missoula.
Jackson Construction Company, a developer, has the mayor Engen been giving them money and got his apartment, his condominium under market price for working with them through an LLC, a shell company.
And so I exposed all this.
And so I was like, Do you understand the story?
Do you understand what it is that I'm telling you?
And they just kind of were like, They're on their cell phones, they were on their computer.
And I was like, You are that rich man.
And I yelled at them.
And I was like, You have stolen from my home.
You have stolen from my community.
Like, my grandparents had to sell their family home.
My grandparents had to sell their family home.
My uncle had to sell my great grandparents' home because they can no longer afford to pay the property taxes here.
You know, we've been here since the 70s.
My grandpa led Hellgate High School to its first state champion, legendary.
My grandpa has taken Hellgate High School, yeah.
Wow, what a great name.
We're actually where the city of Missoula, the entryway to the city of Missoula is called Hellgate Canyon.
Really?
Yeah.
That's amazing.
There's a beach right down the street from here that we call the Gates of Hell because it's Junction 666.
That's cool.
Yeah, it's funny.
Yeah, it's called Hellgate Canyon because when the settlers were coming through, the Native Americans would kill all the settlers and just leave their corpses.
Oh, fuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
So, like, my family, my mom has been a teacher.
My grandfather was a teacher at Hellgate, a biology teacher.
My mom has been a teacher in the Montana School District for almost 25 years now.
I was going to be a teacher.
My grandfather was a minister, helped build a couple of churches here.
My father is a rancher who owns 10,000 acres up 40 miles from here.
My family has deep, deep, deep connections here.
And people are leaving because they can't afford to live here anymore because wealthy people from out of state are coming in and buying the politicians.
And the people that are, the slumlords that are here, they force people to pay exorbitant rents, but pretty much all the people that live here live in squalor at their slums.
My sister moved out of a place that this guy, He has multiple boats.
He has four wheelers and snowmobiles and a large truck.
And he could barely be bothered to go and fix anything that they had wrong with their apartment.
Like their apartment was falling apart.
Punishment for Speaking Out00:04:30
And so I yelled at the mayor and they jailed me for inciting improper influence of a government official, is what they said.
They arrested you right there on the spot?
Uh, no, they put out a warrant for my arrest and I turned myself in because I was like, You guys are stupid, like, this is so dumb.
They jailed, they put me in jail for a month.
Um, and it's been a year, it's now it'll be a year and a half before I get my trial.
Uh, and the reason being is because they don't have anything, like, uh, they're they're they're oh, one of the things that people don't know is that, um, Kalispell, Montana is actually a hub for drone development.
And there's a lot of money and people wanting to put me in jail and punish me for what I did, right?
And if they put me in jail, then I lose all my medical benefits from the VA, which is how I survive right now.
So if I go to jail, then I get all my benefits taken away.
If they convict me of a felony, I'm no longer eligible for benefits.
And I'm basically going to be a poor man on the street.
They can silence you effectively.
Yeah.
Do you think this is specifically tied to your whistleblowing and speaking out about the drone programs and all this?
Absolutely.
The guy who got me into speaking out at the city council meeting, he actually told me that I was, he's like, you're probably going to go to jail.
And I was like, I'm not going to do anything to go to jail.
But the guy set me up.
The guy was a government agent that was specifically set me up to go to jail.
He told me that I was going to go to jail.
And I know that there's a lot of people out there that are fucking pissed at me.
They want me to suffer, they want to punish me.
And they're pissed off that I haven't faced any consequences for my action.
But You're going to punish someone for telling the truth when it's these people who are fraud, waste, and abuse of government resources.
They're murdering people.
Like the consequences for that are more dire than having the truth revealed.
Because if the consequences, you know, for stealing money from the community, it means that the community is undermined.
We look at what happened with the coronavirus, like we should have had a pandemic team in place to show us and tell us how we're supposed to deal with the situation and have proper guidelines.
But we have people dying all over the place, we have hospitals that are overrun.
CEOs that are, well, we can't make money off of this.
So they're writing people as getting the coronavirus, but they're not taking care of people because they're getting money from the government, like bare money from the government, but they're so greedy that they don't want to spend any of that money on what it's actually supposed to be spent on.
Right.
And I had thought that my own reputation would save me from dire consequences because, A, I'm not sitting here trying to incite violence.
I'm not sitting here.
Trying to attack people like I'm standing my ground, which is what you're supposed to do, right?
I don't, I will defend myself and I will defend others, but I will first make sure that if you are going to be in these positions of power, that you will, I don't want their job, I want them to do their job right.
Because if they don't do their job right, I suffer the consequences, my community suffers the consequences, you know, and that's not what I want to do.
I've traveled all over the world, I've seen what happens in places like Egypt and Europe.
And even other places of the United States where corrupt politicians just build concrete cities and they don't take care of their people.
There's homelessness everywhere.
Mayor Engen ran on this in 2012.
He ran on this to get to lower homelessness in Missoula.
Well, homelessness has increased like 400% in Missoula, and they've done nothing to elevate it.
Right.
And so we have all these wealthy people coming in.
The person that he is grooming to run for mayor next is a woman from Wisconsin named Gwen Jones.
And Gwen Jones is what she has done.
Anytime anyone goes to city council and talks out at city council, she looks them up on the internet and will go to the place that they work with and get them fired.
Veterans Murdered by Conspiracy00:15:37
She'll be like, If you don't fire your worker for what he's done, I'm going to ruin your business.
She'll do that.
She was the reason she and a guy named Brian Von Mossberg.
Are the reason why I was put in jail in the first place because they actually found my stalker's videos of me and used my stalker's videos as a reason to put me away.
Which is exciting to me because now my stalker is going to have to admit in the court of law whether or not what he was saying was true or not.
And this guy has been inciting violence against me.
He's actually tried to get veterans to come and kill me and my family.
Who is this guy?
His name is Rick Ryneerson, and he's got this blog called Pick Your Battles.
And he says on his blog, Pick Your Battles is a phrase that people say when they don't battle.
But Sun Tzu in The Art of War specifically says, Pick your battles because you only have a limited amount of energy.
And if you can pick your battles, you will be more efficient in how you use that energy.
So, what is his goal in battling you or trying to go against you?
Or, what is he trying to do?
Is he trying to silence you?
What he's trying, he's trying to.
So, his wife is a lawyer who works for Raytheon and has worked for Johnson Johnson and Monsanto.
So, Raytheon is the company that has the main military contract for the drone operations.
So, he is probably being directly paid by someone to put all this stuff out there.
And he's, I, he's, this guy is kind of fucked up because he says that he denied, when he was in the drones, he denied an order to shoot.
But I'm not, if he did that, then he did the right thing.
But I'm not.
Oh, so this guy was in the drone program.
Yeah, he claims to be in it.
Okay.
Okay.
And then he drove an armored vehicle through Border Patrol coming from New Mexico and recorded it and said and sued the Border Patrol for illegal search and seizure under the United States Constitution, violating his constitutional amendment rights and tried to make himself out to be a whistleblower.
And then when I, he contacted me and tried to get me to be part of this group called Veterans Against Police Abuse, and then tried to set me up with a guy who got a, like, he sent me down to this, never met, he's a drunk.
And everything that I've heard about him from people in the program hate him.
They say that he's one of the worst fucking people that they've ever met.
But he got me, sent me down to this conference for police abuse, and wanted me to hang out with these guys.
Bought my ticket to go there and then leave the next day.
He wanted me to stay there a couple days, and I was like, I don't want to do this.
Like, I don't feel comfortable.
And then got mad at me for not staying there.
Well, the people that he wanted me to hang out with ended up being arrested in downtown Austin that night.
And then one day he posted this thing on Facebook how he doesn't believe in free will, and he believes that we are all destined to behave and act a certain way.
And I disagreed with him.
I was like, I believe in free will and I believe that I have the choice to do what I want to do.
And after that, he just started attacking me and everything that I did.
So this guy is just a narcissist with deep connections to deep pockets and has been really trying.
There's a blog called This Ain't Hell, which is a blog about angry veterans who just hate people.
And they.
They reported on me as being, they said, like, our contacts inside the drone program say that Brandon Bryant's a liar and filthy piece of shit and all this type of stuff.
And some of my grandpa's former wrestlers are Rangers.
And one of them came to me and was like, You better shut up and stop telling lies.
And I was like, I'm not telling a lie.
And he's like, Swear on your grandpa's life.
And I was like, I swear on my grandpa's life.
I'm not telling a lie.
And this guy went back to this group of people and they murdered him.
For standing up for me.
How did they murder a ranger?
Yeah.
So, this group of angry veterans who were threatening me and threatening to kill me if I didn't shut up, this guy who was one of my grandpa's former wrestlers came to me and was like, if you don't shut up, we're going to hurt you.
We're going to come after you.
What happened to these people that murdered him?
Are they in prison now?
No, no.
He died in a fire, house fire.
And there was no sort of investigation to homicide?
Nope.
Native American kid.
So they didn't do any investigation.
And where was this?
Here in Montana.
The kid's name was J.C. Whitacomb.
And he.
Whitacomb?
Yep, Whitacomb.
And he was murdered.
I also had a friend who was part of Lulsec in a similar story.
How do you know for sure he was murdered, though?
How do you know these people actually.
You're saying they burned his house down?
With him in it.
How do you know that, though?
Because.
These guys were inciting violence against me on their website and blog.
And this guy was, JC told me all the things that they were going to do to me.
They were going to kill me.
They were going to torture me and murder me.
They're going to kill my family as well.
And he stood up for me.
And less than a week after that, he was killed.
Like these are the types of things, you know, people discredit disgruntled veterans, but when veterans feel like they've been wronged or when they have a target, like they think I'm a traitor.
They people call me a traitor or a monster.
I have no friends.
Um, and so this guy was sticking up for me and they killed him.
And then after that happened, there was no more talk about me on their blog until Rick Ryneerson wrote a guest piece for them and started inciting violence against me again.
Uh, and uh, another guy who's from Lulsec, who, um, I don't know if you know who Lulsec is, but it was a A group who broke off from 4chan, a hacker group.
This guy I knew personally, and he was my friend, and he was actually my contact to give me a bunch of information about what was going on.
He was the one that was following forums.
He was the one that was, when the FBI came to my house and told me that if I didn't shut up and stop speaking, then ISIS would come and kill me and my mother.
He did the research for me and found out that it wasn't anyone outside of the country that was doing it, it was Christian patriots who were.
Saying that I was a traitor and I deserved to die.
And I had him start researching information about this, and he died a month later under mysterious circumstances.
So, you know, there's very evil people, really evil people in this world.
Back in October, I had a man throw a knife at me through my open window, driving down the interstate.
Or the freeway at 70 miles an hour.
And I've never seen anyone throw a knife like that except for a Marine.
And it hit me in the head.
And the only reason that it didn't kill me was because it tumbled and the hilt hit me right here in the head.
And I moved my head.
So it would have hit me straight in the temple, but I moved my head slightly because I saw it coming at me and it hit me right here in the back of the head.
So, like, there are people that are actively trying to kill me in my life and trying to hurt me and my family.
Because of the things that I've done, including members of my own community and even the police department.
I mean, obviously, I can tell you're really angry.
And this, everything that you're talking about with the drone program and all your experiences have definitely changed you.
Yeah.
But don't you think about the fact that maybe talking about things like, even though you may strongly feel like your friend may have been murdered or people you know may have been murdered, but do you think, do you ever think about publicly saying that you know for a fact they were murdered and blaming a specific group of people for that?
I worked with these people.
I know exactly.
I know exactly how they think and operate.
Like, I worked with these people.
I might have just been a drone operator cameraman, but I worked with these people.
I was in the direct center of the epicenter of who these people are.
Like, I know how they operate, what they do.
I remember when Chelsea Manning first blew the whistle.
That was when I was still in the program.
I remember how people fucking hated her.
I remember how people talked about her and Julian Assange and all that type of stuff.
They're saying the same thing about me.
I've spoken to veterans.
I know veterans in my own community that tell me that if they ever get me alone, they will fucking kill me and they will not have any question about it.
And they tell me all the time that they think that they'll get away with it because no one's going to defend me.
No one's going to protect me.
I tried to live in Norway.
I tried to move to Norway.
And even when I found out that the Norwegians are helping create the missile parts, You know, for the Hellfire missile.
And guess who they have working in their factories?
Refugees who are from the very countries that are affected by the drones are coming in and moving to Norway and working in the factories that build the same weapon systems that destroy their community.
And as soon as I found out about that and started talking about that over in Norway, the Norwegians beat me up, broke my arm, stole my son from me, and kicked me out of my country.
Out of their country.
How long were you in Norway for?
I was in Norway off and on for about two and a half years.
Oh, wow.
I was trying to live there.
I was trying to get a visa and everything.
And the woman who got pregnant with my son sabotaged me.
She took all my paperwork, forged the paperwork, and did all sorts of stuff.
Like, it's a mess.
Like, people are purposely interfering in my life.
Like, I can't live a normal life because of all this type of stuff.
I try.
I try to live a normal life.
I didn't do this for fame or wealth or celebrity status.
I did it because it was the right thing to do.
I did it because it was what I was trained to do.
Even the military kept telling me integrity first, service before self, excellence in all we do, always tell the truth, always do the right thing, you know, the same thing over and over again.
And I'm doing it.
And the people that are doing the wrong thing just so happen to have more power and influence.
And they can't face me publicly.
None of these people, I've talked to members of Congress, Ted Lau, who's in charge of the drone oversight committee, you know, they don't give a fuck.
They do not give a fuck.
How did you speak to Ted Lau?
I went to DC.
And where did you talk to him?
Did you talk to him in person?
In person in his office.
And what sort of ideas did you express to him and what were his reactions specifically?
I expressed to him that what we were doing is wrong and we need to curb back and start reassessing why we're using this technology.
And he's like, But isn't drones better at killing people than boots on the ground or an F 16?
Aren't they more precise?
Aren't they more surgical?
And he was just, he just gave me excuse after excuse for why drones should be used rather than listening to anything that I had to say.
What was your main concern that you brought to him?
My main concern was it collateral damage?
No, actually, my main concern that I brought to him was how the people inside the program are being treated and abused.
And the consequence of that, how it affects, you know, why people take the shots, why people are angry, why people are.
And the leadership and all that type of stuff.
Like, I brought more personal insider stuff.
What people don't understand is that I've gone up my chain of command.
Like, I've gone up my chain of command in three separate occasions.
I went to my supervisor, I went to my supervisor's supervisor, I went to my flight commander, I went to my commander, I went to my first shirt, I went to my DO of two different squadrons, and then I went up the civilian chain of command, I went up to senators, I went to politicians.
And none of these people, I went to politicians in my own state, John Tester and Steve Daines, and asked them if they would address this and if they would talk to me and help me and support me.
And they told me directly that they do not support or help people like me.
So, how I'm a good American boy.
I was a good Christian boy who joined the military and am doing everything that he taught.
I did everything right, I've done everything right.
You know, I'm intelligent.
I observe.
I am thoughtful.
Like, I'm deliberate.
And, like, I've tried to do everything right.
And so, the only way that I figured out to do anything right more is to do things on my own and to talk to people like you.
Actually, I'm more interested in the academic side of it because I feel like if more people are educated on this than those people that are educated who are pursuing a route.
In the legality of this or the ethics of it, will have the clout to stand up eventually to say to stop this, you know?
Yeah, I totally, I totally think that's the right way to do it.
I'm happy you're doing it that way.
Talking to the right people, you know, going to the right media outlets, expressing yourself in a thoughtful, intelligent way.
I mean, I've spoken to the United States Security Council, the United Nations Security Council, like I spoke directly to the UN Security Council in a private meeting.
And told them all my concerns, you know.
But what really, what power do they have?
You know, they can come out with a report that says, Yeah, the United States is wrong and causing devastation all over the world, but ultimately, it's the United States that has to do the right thing, right?
Holding Corporations Accountable00:05:14
And then, you know, what is the root cause of this?
We talked about the art of war, right?
How do you resolve a conflict like this between nations?
How do you create peace?
Obviously, it's not dropping bombs and killing tens of thousands of innocent people, but, but.
We the United States doesn't want to create peace, does it?
It's this is a result of the industrial, the uh, the military industrial complex and businesses making more money, yeah, and spending what was the the military was it like a trillion dollars thing Congress passed for military spending, yeah, recently?
I mean, the core of the problem is Wall Street, the lobbyists, the military industrial complex, and I don't know what the answer to that is.
Uh, the answer to that is, is to.
Put them all in prison.
Get Bernie Sanders in office?
Yeah.
Well, we need a second Nuremberg.
Yeah, we, well, actually, I think we need a second Nuremberg.
Do you know what the Nuremberg trials were?
No.
So the Nuremberg trials were what happened after World War II, the Nazi trials.
Okay.
So they were the trials where the Nazis were, you know, I was just following orders, right?
There needs to be a precedent.
These people need to be held accountable.
It's like the fact that, you know, Citizens United, how corporations are considered people.
Yes.
Okay.
So the reason why that is, is because it means that the People that are running the corporations.
I think corporations are not people, they're vehicles for people to operate in.
And if corporations are people, then they should be held accountable the same accountability that an individual is held accountable for.
But because they're not, they cannot be.
You know, corporations can go under and then they start up again under a new name.
Right.
And the people that are running this and making these decisions are not being held accountable.
They just want money.
It's just greed.
It's the same thing that's happening in my town.
Like we could be putting money, this taxpayer money, To better education, better health, you know, better environment.
You know, but we have all these people that want to develop Montana because they're coming from Silicon Valley, they're coming from New Jersey and New York, they're coming from Seattle, and they want to bring the same environment that they had over there over to here.
But we have vastly more limited resources than they do.
We can't build on top of a hill here because that means that we have to drill a hole hundreds of meters to get to the water basin that is.
That the aquifer that is below that costs more money than actually building the places that are going up.
But these developers want to build high rise condominiums here so that they can densify my home, but they're only doing it for money.
They're not taking into consideration the people that originally lived here.
It's colonization, it's colonialism, is what it is.
It's not even the military industrial complex.
It's you got something that I want and I'm going to take it.
That's what it is.
And these people are evil.
These people are evil.
Like, there's no other word to describe it.
They're evil.
Do you think, well, Joe Biden was elected president today, sworn in.
Do you think there's any chance that he could help steer this ship away from the rocks or that administration at all?
I mean, what do you think the difference is going to be?
Do you have any kind of, is there any glimpse of optimism inside you?
As much as I feel very proud that Kamala Harris is our first female vice president and not Hillary Clinton, I feel more a trepidation that we are headed towards a police state, a fascist police state, rather than more freedom.
I whistle blew during the Obama administration when Joe Biden was vice president.
And unless Joe Biden takes a stand against the military industrial complex and being like, we need to pull back.
We need to, we need to, like, we're in a climate crisis right now.
We don't even have 50 years left on this planet if we don't get our shit together.
And there are people that wanting to make trillions of dollars.
Jeff Bezos has made more money in the last year than he's made his entire rest of his career.
And yet we have people starving and on the street in a homeless population that is growing exponentially.
We have more than four empty houses per homeless people in the United States.
And yet, it's more profitable to keep those houses empty for the banks than to allow people to go in and move into them.
We have a humanitarian crisis that is building that will probably gulf Yemen pretty soon.
And Yemen and the stuff in the Middle East was just practice for these people to come back and do it over here.
Trump Supporters and QAnon00:02:05
That's how I feel about it.
No sort of optimism for the future.
Well, if people will take a stand, then yes.
Um, my you know, I listen to people to Trump supporters to try to understand them and the QAnon supporters and even the anti vaxxers.
It sounds like those kind of QAnon supporters are the same type of people that have the blog, the guy who is against you.
That sounds like the kind of person who was some of those people that stormed the Capitol last week, yep.
Yeah, and actually, Ryan Nearson is a QAnon and Trump supporter as well.
Um, and uh, even the people so the people that got me to speak up against the city council.
I find out later that they're Trump supporters and QAnon supporters as well, conspiracy theorists.
And so I'm not going to say, make speculation and be like, all these people are connected, but there are many similarities that I observe in between behaviors and actions.
And my military training, I spent eight months in training for observation.
That's what my original job was before drones, being an intelligence operator that observes.
Right, observes and disseminates.
And I feel like that was some of the best training that I could have ever gotten in my life.
And on top of all the healing and self work that I've done, it helps me, like, I can tell the similarities between the actions that are going on.
And I can make those connections just like I had been in training.
You know, these guys aren't, you know, when people act in secret, eventually these things will come out.
Eventually, people who act in secret and think they're going to get away, they're going to get lazy and something's going to happen that is going to expose it.
But we see what's happening right now.
Things are being exposed all the time.
And so, more misinformation is being thrown out there.
Learning Wisdom Before Change00:06:26
And these people no longer care if they're being exposed because they can say something else and still get away with it because no one has the power to actually stand up and do anything about it.
Who's going to stand up to the military industrial complex?
Are you?
Right.
Is your average viewer going to just watch your videos and say, well, that's good information.
I'm going to do something about it.
I've spoken to millions of people all over the world.
And one of the things that I was talking about in Europe is being like, if you think drones are a problem, you can get involved to do something about it.
But that's probably not going to be your thing.
There's going to be a crisis that you are going to have to address.
It's going to be different from the drones.
But I can tell you this.
This is what I did when I ran into my crisis, and this is what I think that you can do.
I think that you can make a stand.
I think that you can be like, Yeah, this is right and this is wrong.
We all know what's right and wrong.
What is in us, what is in this portion of us, can tell us what is right and wrong.
If we are curious, if we want to know, if we want to be at peace with ourselves and the world around us, we just have to make a stand for what is right.
We don't have to fix it because eventually, if enough people get there, the fixing will be done.
Right?
We just have to make a stand and be like, enough's enough.
Enough is enough.
We don't have to do the Capitol riot shit.
We don't have to storm the Capitol.
We don't have to lynch anyone.
We don't have to do that.
We just have to, we want, we should want justice, not vengeance.
You know, Buddha says this about vengeance.
He says, if you want vengeance, dig two graves.
Ooh.
Yeah.
Right.
We don't want vengeance.
We do not want vengeance.
Christ says this you will lose everything that you love and you will keep everything that you hate.
Right.
So we must recognize that everything in our life that we love, eventually that we will lose it.
And if we hate something, we will carry it with us.
We don't want to carry hate.
No hate.
I've carried hate.
I know what hate feels like.
It's sickening, it's tiring, it makes you feel worthless, it makes you feel powerless.
That's what hate does.
You know, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side, right?
And it creates internal suffering for yourself, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And what are we going to be attached to?
Are we going to be attached to love?
You know, are we going to be attached to that concept?
Love comes from within.
Love comes from with it's easy to love someone that loves you back.
It's harder to love someone that you despise, right?
But the love only bears fruit if you give it to someone who is acting unlovable.
Kindness only works towards people who are being unkind, right?
So, what are we supposed to do?
I've gone all the way to the fucking top of the chain of command, basically.
I know President Obama and Biden and Trump know who I am.
I know that for a fucking fact.
But have they done anything?
No.
So where do I need to go?
The people.
The people need to do it.
The people need to stand up for themselves.
The people deserve healthcare.
Healthcare isn't a right.
Healthcare is not a right.
Healthcare is not something that is like you have to beg for.
That should be base level because who builds all the stuff?
Who buys all the stuff?
The people.
No one's going to build anything.
No one's going to invent anything.
No one's going to To live a life that is meaningful and beneficial if they're sick.
Totally agree, man.
I totally agree.
All this money needs to be, we need to be focusing on ourselves and our own communities and bettering each other with our health care.
We need to make ourselves and our children give them better educations and everything.
We need to heal ourselves before we try to change the world.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And if we do it to ourselves, the world will change.
Right.
Right.
If we take a look in ourselves, I don't know if you know anything about like the Eightfold Path, the Buddhist Eightfold Path, right?
Talks about right thought.
Actually, I'm going to reference the Bhagavad Gita because that's actually my favorite.
I might not like religion, but I love spiritual scripture.
Like, I just, I love it.
The poet, the poetic.
There's a lot to learn from religion.
There's a lot of real life references in religion that I think are very relevant to human being and suffering.
Absolutely.
And one of the things I like about the Bhagavad Gita is the Bhagavad Gita takes place in the middle of a battlefield.
You know, Prince Arjun and his brothers show up at this battlefield after 13 years in exile to take back their inheritance.
And Arjun has this moment of crisis because the people that took his inheritance are the people that trained him and raised him and he loves.
And he's like, How am I supposed to fight these guys?
How am I supposed to fight people that I'm supposed to give my reverence and love to?
I would rather have a beggar's cross and have them murder me unarmed and unresisting.
Than to soil my life with their blood.
Right?
And so, what does Krishna say?
Krishna says, Well, you're here to take back what's yours.
You might as well do it.
And here's the right way be a man of wisdom, Arjun.
Wisdom is my.
I love men of wisdom the most.
Be a wise man.
But if you have to, take the path of right action.
What is right action?
If you eat of the fruits of the path of right action and the path of wisdom, they are the same.
You know, there is no difference.
Wisdom is learning from other people's mistakes, wisdom is learning the mistakes without having to make them your own.
But if you have to make your own, do so with the right mindset, do so with a pure heart, and you will make no mistake.
That's super strong, man.
It is.
So it's what my grandfather told me all the time.
It's what my mother taught me growing up.
I had one of my friends who is a university professor and she works at MIT now.
And I wrote a chapter in her book, Age in the Age of Drone Warfare.
Stories of Heaven and Hell00:03:33
And she called me up one day after I was having a mental breakdown after I got attacked.
People are trying to actually actively kill me and hurt me.
And she's like, she's like, people need to learn, hear what you have to say and learn from you.
And I was like, how am I supposed to teach people the things that I learned when I was a toddler?
You know, I remember the first time that I lied and I got caught for it.
My grandpa says, the reason why you don't lie isn't because you're going to go to hell if you lie.
The reason why you don't lie is because it's so hard to track a story that you make up.
You know, if you have to tell the truth, you can tell the truth, and you only have to suffer the consequence of the truth.
If you tell a lie and you are caught, you have to suffer the consequences of both the lie and the truth.
Right, which is hell.
Which is hell.
No, hell is within.
Here's a story for you that I love.
Actually, one of the inmates told me this in jail.
He was, this is, I'll tell you this story fully.
So I get into jail, and they had been plastering me all over the news.
And these guys had seen me yell at the city council on the news.
And this guy comes on video, yeah, it's on video.
Oh, it's great.
So this guy comes up to me, and like I'm kind of like sitting there, is like, someone's gonna try to make me their right.
This guy sits next to me, he's like, Hey, I want you to read this, and he's like, In my face, and I'm like, Okay, this guy's gonna make me his right.
So I read this story, and it's a story of heaven and hell.
And this samurai warrior goes to this Zen master and says, Master, teach me everything that you know about heaven and hell.
And the master looks at him and says, Teach you about heaven and hell.
I doubt that you could even keep the blood rust off your sword, you ignorant, stupid fool.
Why should I teach you anything about heaven and hell?
And goes off and starts insulting him.
And the samurai is kind of like, Whoa, this guy's fucking on my shit.
He's insulting my honor.
And he pulls his sword with rage and fury and he's about to.
Kill the master, and the master looks at him calmly and says, That is hell.
And the samurai drops his sword and falls to his knees and begs for forgiveness.
And with compassion, the master looks at him and says, That is heaven.
And the samurai picks up his sword and sheathes it and walks away.
And he realized that the master told him everything that he needs to know about him.
Yeah.
What is that from again?
It's just a Zen story.
So this guy was a pretty tough dude, but he was like, On his own path of searching, right?
And he told me that I looked like a sorcerer who was casting spells at the city council.
But he had all this, he would take all these clips of wisdom and put them in this book.
And he would even rip out pages of novels and stuff.
One of the actual stories that he had me read, I actually wrote this journal story when I was in jail, and he wrote this thing about Pietas.
This is from the King Arthur book.
And I compared my grandfather.
To Pietas.
Courage Born from Striving00:05:12
I can just.
Okay.
And this is what it says.
This is actually one of my favorite things that I've ever read.
And I need to find the book that this was so I can read it.
And I think I read it when I was in high school.
That's why it's familiar to me.
But I'll just read this section if you don't mind.
Yeah, for sure.
Some say that this is a fight for our lives, but it isn't.
It is a fight for life itself.
On the mat, the only death is the end of the match, heralded by the whistle of the referee.
In the world it is for order and justice and all the ordinary and simple things, the little things that we have been deprived of for so long, the things that any decent and healthy society should secure, but the truth of America never has a guarantee of food, a safe place to rest, roads that any person may travel with security from thriving town to city and to country, into the wilderness and back again, homes of wealthy folk where some grace of living may grow and mature, free from greed and desire,
giving scope to any who wish to hone their craft and those who simply seek to learn.
Where anyone can read a book on any philosophy, faith, creed, or science and have a healthy discussion of the thoughts and emotions they provoke.
Where lovers can grow old together, watching their children and their children's children thrive to learn the gentler arts of living.
A place where truth, justice, and understanding replace violence, intrigue, and petty tribal jealousy.
That's my dream for Montana.
And that's what we are fighting for.
Martin Luther King spoke of a similar dream while he yet lived.
I get to dreaming of a world where men walk simply without deceit or subterfuge.
A kindlier world than our own that we know right now, where the strong defend the weak instead of the greedy, and to have some manners is not thought to beneath the warrior's dignity.
Truth, justice, and mercy.
One cannot impose these things.
They must grow out of a man's striving for himself.
We wonder why evil and wickedness exist in the world.
Those that follow the church of the dying God say that the world is evil because of one great sin.
I grew up in that religion, but I can no longer prescribe to its remedies.
Though we take the finest sieve and sift the entire universe through it, No molecule of love can ever be found.
For a man who has not known despair knows himself, and no man who does not know himself can find the truth, the rhythm of the universe, and the love that sustains it.
Whether it is on the mat of the battlefield or in everyday life, we must be ready to enter hell's gate and confront all that which lay on the other side.
As Dante says in his Inferno, all hope abandons ye who enter here.
And this is how courage is born.
There is no courage without fear.
The hero of time taught me that.
The bravest is often the most frightened, and if we are afraid of something, that means we must confront it.
In that respect, solitude is often fear's companion.
To be afraid is to be alone, but it is only then a person attains that self discovery.
Pain defines and exacts the price of wisdom, and the price is with pain because it must be paid.
Through courage, one earns honor, and in all of life, my heart, my mind, my body, and my soul, courage is the principal thing.
Shakespeare says that all the world is a stage.
On earth, every man plays a part, and that part is appointed to him by the powers that be before he was even born.
In one incarnation, a slave, in another, a king, in another, a common soldier, a priest, a merchant, even a politician.
In each part, as he plays it out in life, for ill or well, he learns something he needs to know until all good and evil have been experienced, and the soul can distinguish for itself between the two, and so grows towards the perfection that is man's final goal.
A king is not greater than a slave, for both are men.
In fact, a king's role is more difficult, for what a great man does, others will follow.
It is of equal importance.
That they should act their part so that they played the mirror's truth.
This spirit needs to be awoken, set to a standard, create a pattern that even the dullest can comprehend and strive to achieve.
A promise is a promise.
Once given, it must be kept, lived by, or be forfeit of honor.
And to the noble, dishonor is worse than death.
The old faith of the druids holds that once a vow is made, it cannot be unmade without damage to the soul.
In this greater cosmos, we are the individual cosmos.
And in the triad of the bards, obiats, and druids, there are three things no man can alter.
The stars in their course, the flow of the tides and the pattern that unrolls from the given word by these things taught to me that I have learned through my own experience.
I live in service, given without grudging and without hope of reward through the quality of my heart and the respect earned by it.
We must honor our own gods and give respect to other men's.
We must seek truth and speak it always, even to our own harm and hurt.
We must be worthy of trust and trust one another.
I would have us use our strength to protect those that cannot protect themselves, The old, the weak, the infirm, the widows, and the fatherless, even those that we hate, so long as it treads the path of right action.
We must have the manners of kings, equal to any in any land, and so above those things which lead in a man's spirit, anger, lust, and greed.
Honoring Gods and Seeking Truth00:02:28
Well, look, Brandon, I think that was a super strong way to end this thing.
The stuff that you're sharing with the world is super powerful and important, and I'm super grateful for you coming on here and sharing those experiences with me today.
Thank you very much.
Tell people that are listening andor watching where they can find more of the stuff that you're doing or follow more of your work.
Since I was being attacked and harassed, and I had no defense, I've put fire to my social media and I've put my own personal projects to the side.
I would recommend everyone just watching anything.
If they're curious, watch everything, even the stuff my stalker puts out.
Watch that stuff.
Watch what people are putting out there to hurt others.
You know, search for your name, Brandon Bryant, on.
Yep.
Okay.
Just say Brandon Bryant drone.
Okay.
Right.
And that will lead them to anything.
My documentary is on Netflix in full itself.
It is the drone documentary by Tonya Hessen Shai, a Norwegian director and producer.
I think that, you know, when that movie first came out, that was the first time I ever felt that I did something right with this.
So, there's plenty of interviews, plenty of talks.
I'm always open for civil discussion if people want to contact me on my Facebook.
But I can definitely tell you that most people get on Facebook to attack me and say nasty things about me.
And if you do that, then I will respond in kind.
Should we link your Facebook in the description of the video?
You can if you want.
Would you like me to?
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah, I can.
My Twitter has been suspended because I was speaking out against the establishment.
My Instagram is private because people were reporting that.
So all I have is that Facebook Lift.
I also have an email.
You know, if people want to email me, I think it's out there on the internet, they can.
But if they're curious, they can.
But I just want to mostly encourage people to stand up for themselves, you know, and reflect on what's right, you know, get rid of emotion, get rid of thought, and just do what is right, you know, love one another, you know, even when it's hard, especially when it's hard.