Interview with drone tech
Cian Westmoreland
“If it failed, we were told that people on our side would potentially die. But I knew that if it stayed up, people on the Afghan side would die.”
 By Bob Meola, Courage to Resist
September 21, 2016
Cian Westmoreland is a former drone program technician who has spoken out against the U.S. drone wars. He was one of a group of four drone whistleblowers who spoke out in 2015. Cian joined the Air Force on April 18, 2006. His reasons for joining were multidimensional. But a reason he joined was that his father was in the Air Force. He’d been a US Air Force Russian Linguist. Following is some of what Cian told me...
“I had plans to stay in and become a Staff Sgt., until I went to Afghanistan. I even received an early promotion. But in Afghanistan I was building a system that was being used for airstrikes at the same time our base was being bombed.
“When this mortar exploded about 100 feet away from me, I started to think about my own life and what I was doing there and what I felt in that moment. I tried to imagine what the children were going through who stood at the fence and begged for water every day, while I stood there unable to do anything for them, despite the fact that just behind me we had a Taco Bell, McDonalds, and a Tim Hortons.
“The day the boss gathered us around the equipment and said, ‘We’re killing bad guys here, boys.’, it felt like I had something around my throat. I felt a lump in my throat like I couldn’t breathe..."
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