This was a big thing for drone people based out of Eppley AFB in Omaha. Wake up, drive to work, attack enemies, drive home, sit there eating dinner with your family trying to pretend you didn’t kill someone and can’t talk about it. Combat troops get to lean on each other after a firefight: “dude, good shot. That guy was about to get us!” You get validation that you did something to safe you and your friends, and it’s still a heavy burden, but you have people who were there telling you that you’re a good person and did the right thing.
The Air Force did something shockingly reasonable (according to the newspaper coverage): they require all pilots to attend mandatory counseling sessions. Then there was no sign of weakness or any of that toxic nonsense. “Ugh, guess I have to go talk to the doc today, and I don’t want to, but guess orders are orders.”
It's Offut AFB, home of StratCom. Eppely is the municipal airport. And Offut doesn't have any drone units, nor do they manage any. They due process reconnaissance for sure, but actual drone strikes aren't conducted from there.
Creech AFB is where most of the drone units operating Reaper/Avenger etc are based.
My Google-fu is failing me right now, but when we lived in Nebraska, there was a long article in the Omaha World-Herald (I'm fairly sure) talking about the mental health problems of the local drone pilots. This would've been at least 15 years ago or so, and things have very likely moved around since then.
It was definitely Creech. I remember the spate of articles discussing how the officers (the USAF requires drones to be piloted by officers) were both struggling with the close up nature of drone strikes combined with fewer or even non-existent flight hours affecting promotions.
It didn't help that there was a sense that it was a non-job compared to direct flying duties - "what do you mean PTSD, you spend all day playing DCS!" etc.
It's around here. Doesn't look like much of anything, except an awful lot of fence for what looks like not much of anything. I've never seen movement. (The highest mountain in the area sticks up nearly two miles above the base and overlooks it. This time of the year most hikers will be on some part of said mountain.)
Some searching led me to this report from an NGO called "AirWars" [1] which, in connection with The Guardian, reports that "at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes".
You can't bomb an apartment without also hitting the neighbors. And while we know the US has the the technology to hit a car driver without (physically) hurting the passenger, we also know that this is not the type of technology deployed regularly.
I don't think a drone operator would be naive enough to believe that they are killing exclusively military targets and no one else.
The real truth is that Israel is happy to flatten entire, crowded, apartment complexes. That "one guy" is just an excuse.
Most recent example (out of at least 100,000 examples in just these last 3 years alone) would be their "defence" (hah!) minister delightedly boasting how they have Gaza'fied South Lebanon and destroyed over 15,000 structures.
Israel actually has the capability of targeting a single apartment in an apartment building, and has done so dozens of times in the current war against Hezbollah.
Destroying civilian infrastructure and killing civilians is the current Israeli government's goal. Military advantage is just a nice window dressing for the Geneva Conventions.
Lot easier to steal land if there aren't any people living there (because the infrastructure to support modern life was destroyed).
To take out just the room where the target is requires knowing what room the target is in. They usually do not have that kind of information. Hamas has been on the front lines for decades, they know about concealment.
Does Israel actually have the capacity to target the whole of Hamas with those small accurate bombs, as they get intelligence on them? If Hamas is in the basement can the small bomb get them? And if they forgo the opportunity will it be possible to target that person again soon without civilians nearby?
An important one that often that gets lost in "drone strikes bad" internet debating: the cost of the alternative.
If a nation is conducting drone strikes on another nation's territory, the alternative is usually conventional forces at scale on the ground*.
As the Iraq occupation showed, conventional ground forces at scale cause an even larger number of civilian deaths.
So drone strikes, if kinetic intervention is pre-decided, are a less-bad option from a civilian casualty perspective.
* Granted, there might be a decision not to deploy conventional forces because of the risk / cost, but if there are regular drone strikes, it feels like the aggressor country is past that Rubicon.
Isn't "if there are regular drone strikes, it feels like the aggressor country is past that Rubicon." kind of self-refuting?
Conventional forces aren't deployed in many instances where regular drone strikes are used, thus the country didn't feel it was the right risk/cost to deploy conventional forces.
At the very least, it's a statement that deserves more debate, and I'd point to the many examples of how reducing cost and risk tends to increase the rate of an activity.
GWB got heat for extralegal extraordinary renditions. Obama solved it by just killing them. I guess we can’t ask the dead guys if they’d prefer to go to Guantanamo.
> key organizer for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda.
Yeah, I don't see a problem here. Due process, slippery slope sure... but this was a cut and dry case. I've got better things to do with my time than be concerned with this.
In Afghanistan, and presumably Iran as well, the US military defined all "military-aged males" (12-65 years) as "combatants". This makes children and old men killable. You could drone strike pretty much any guy you wanted and all you were doing was eliminating combatants.
An addition, again from Afghanistan, only 2% of drone strikes were against identified targets. The rest were targets of opportunity. So you make most of the male population of a country killable through the use of appropriate language, and then hit 98% of them because you think they might be thinking about doing something bad in the future.
I can see why this would mess with people's mental health when what they're doing to random civilians sinks in.
Do you have a source showing this is actually the U.S. military’s standard, rather than a distorted reference to the Obama era casualty counting controversy?
Let's see. They were part of the US military, right? In just this war alone, they started by triple tapping an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, murdering nearly 200 little children.
And on the same day, they attacked a SPORTS STADIUM, completely vapourising a women's volleyball team who were in the midst of a game.
And that was just ... DAY ONE.
By now, we should be asking - if you're a member of the US military on active duty in an active war - prove that YOU DIDN'T kill a child, mother, handicapped person in a wheelchair, or a grandpa.
- Built as part of an IRGCN base (that base was closed in 2013)
- Within 100 yards of the perimeter of an active IRGCN base at the time of the strike
- Targeted as a result of extensive use of Palantir's Maven Smart System and Claude by the US military to pre-identify targets
Given all of that, I think the most accurate takeaway would be that the US military is deficient in their target approval process. (Arguably grossly so, though that's an international law legal question)
There's been less investigation into the background behind the Lamerd sports hall attack, but it's fairly certainly an intended US strike, likely for the same reason that the Azadi stadium was hit: assumption that it would be used as a muster point for an Iranian military response.
My takeaway from the atrocities is that there need to be substantial updates to international laws of war around (a) automated target approval (even worse excesses by the Israelis in the initial Gaza strikes) and ultimate human responsibility and (b) more strongly defining what constitutes due diligence in intelligence and classification of military targets.
Currently, both are far too nebulous and will likely lead to both incidents being classified as war as usual. Whereas there was a plausible route to both being removed as targets with even non-manual open source intelligence scraping (substantial patterns of school activity over years and the volleyball game schedule, respectively).
We sure do. They mostly work in federal government and government contracting corporations. There are multiple clearly documented repeated drone strikes on US citizens, even US citizen minors, who never were even indicted with a crime, that ended in assassination. Like the two intentional strikes it took to kill 16 year old US citizen from colorado, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... . See also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix executive program in general.
This american citizen minor certainly was. And the claim of collateral damage is already shown false by the fact that they went after the kid (16 years old) intentionally, twice. Even after they knew his father was already dead. Oh, and by the way, they never indicted the father or showed evidence against the father either. Neither were in a war zone of any sort.
The other examples on the second wikipedia link were literally non-US citizen journalists who later sued the US in a US federal court he brought where he showed up and wasn't arrested because he didn't do anything wrong.
I'm with you that being a US citizen doesn't mean someone is "good". But in this case I've literally given non-US citizen examples too that you passed over for this mistargeted aside.
That is true for all people. Not just Americans. It’s just disgusting to say that all Americans are innocent but we can assume others are guilty. As far as I know Bin Laden was killed without ever being tried in a criminal court.
Are school shooters in America innocent if they are killed before getting a trial?
Bin Laden was indicted in a court of law multiple times for multiple crimes over a decade. The evidence presented was clear. https://www.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/947/Bin-Lad... None of these disposition matrix assassinations ever had evidence against them presented in court. The terrorists in the executive branch and their terrorist enforcers in the military just assassinated them without trial.
I'd say anyone who chooses to kill a civilian, whether based on an order or not, is a war criminal. I really don't care if they thought they were there for a noble cause or not.
What if they choose to kill a person who was a civilian until they were drafted into the enemy army the day before?
What if the civilian they kill has a substantial effect on the enemy's military capabilities, for example by being someone famous who loudly endorses the honour of signing up to fight for one's country, thereby motivating thousands of young men to do just that?
What if killing a soldier’s children might make him lose his resolve or act erratically? What if destroying an entire city full of millions of civilians might make the enemy lose hope and surrender? What if poisoning the land and water for decades could prevent the enemy from reconstituting itself? What if killing all the women could prevent the production of future soldiers?
Once you open the door, where do you draw the line?
I interpret your examples as further evidence (in addition to the examples I gave) that there is no sensible justification for distinguishing military from civilian casualties. Was that your intention?
On the contrary, I was fully intending to show that you need a hard line between civilian and military when considering military action, or mass atrocities and even genocide are almost certain. It’s a little concerning that you didn’t understand that, or willfully misunderstood that. Make sure you don’t lose your humanity.
I think someone who considers a civilian's life to be starkly more valuable than the life of a person who was a civilian yesterday but, through no choice of their own, is a soldier today, should be mindful of their own humanity.
It is precisely the concept of such a "hard line" -- which by design enables such inhumanity to be passed off as inconsequential -- that must be brought out into the light and examined.
Civilians die in wars, and that's with the best intentions of all parties to the conflict. If one or both has got radicalised, then a lot of civilians die in war.
No, I'm explaining to you that accidental civilian casualties in a war is a normal part of the terrible activity that is war. Good soldiers with the best of intentions will kill civilians in a war, because war is chaotic and very dangerous.
Radicalised soldiers and armies will give less and less concern to civilians, and at a certain hated level civilians actually will get targeted by individual soldiers or squads. If it then moves up the command chain and there's not enough accountability or pushback from the top leadership then you get to proper genocidal actions like what happened at Srebrenica.
Targeting civilians for death is not acceptable or justifiable.
> Targeting civilians for death is not acceptable or justifiable.
so we have numerous evidence of US and its allied forces deliberatly murdering civilians and nothing happens. Why do you think targeting is not acceptable? from the evidence of dead innocent civilians, it sure as hell, seems like the military people think its acceptable and justifiable (which you just tried to justify by calling it "normal part")
The author of that page appears to be a Holocaust denier[1]. Not exactly the example I would put forwards, especially if I want to make an unannealed appeal against Israeli war crimes.
[1]: A search for that name mostly brings up links to pages for SS apologia.
Yes: the content is very different from what I remembered it as from back when I first visited it after Aaron died, I don't know how the website went where it went, and I'm sorry I didn't check prior to posting.
"War crimes" is something of a shorthand for being involved in an aggressive war; they are a surprisingly minor influence on the discourse because they are small in comparison to the decision to go to war at all.
I think the more baby-steps approach to western cognitive dissonance is to at least get them to be consistent about when it is a good idea to go to war. I'm more than happy to get downvoted pointing out that killing 100s of thousands of Russians and welding them strategically to China was a terrible policy, uniting Asian manufacturing and resource giants is catastrophic for western power. But people were grumpy and didn't want to talk about realpolitik because the Russians are so evil.
Now we have the US attacking Persians in Persia for trying to govern Persia because the US sphere of influence covers the whole world and doing serious damage to the West's access to global oil markets and we have this muted and philosophical response from the powers that be. It isn't just immoral, it is also actively stupid - if we can tolerate this behaviour from the US, why can't we also tolerate Russia on a far smaller and easier to understand scale? How are all the sanctions and weapons deliveries to Ukraine actually justified in the minds of the people making the decisions? It clearly isn't a moral calculation and it seems to be stupid strategy.
If we got some thoughtful and transparent thinkers in power there'd probably just be less wars, they seem to be the fast path to poverty and the upside is hard to spot. There are serious questions about why any of the major conflicts right now looked like a good idea to the people in Washington and wherever NATO is in Europe. Brussels I suppose. Can we try peace and prosperity as a strategy?
The South Korean government was a military dictatorship at the time. And the North was wealthier. Without the power of foresight, you couldn't justify the war as bringing democracy or economic prosperity, it was purely a geopolitical struggle. It took a lot of historical revisionism to erase that inconvenient little fact from western consciousness.
The majority opinion at the time, in the west, was that communism led to less economic prosperity, less democratic institutions, and less freedom. So maybe it wasn't a guarantee that the south would become a democracy or prosperous, but doing nothing would guarantee the opposite.
Also, the North wasn't democratic either so it was two nondemocratic groups fighting.
> the most damaging part of direct combat is watching people that you consider to be family die or be maimed.
I've heard from various places over the years (documentaries, friends) that soldiers really fight for their comrades at the end of the day. As in when asked "why are you here fighting" if they are in front of a news crews or something where they have to say "we're bringing democracy to ..." they'll just say something like "those fuckers blew my buddy up and I am here to pay them back".
That's a well studied topic in military history/science called unit cohesion. The saying goes that morale gets the soldiers to the battlefield, cohesion is what keeps them there. In order to withstand the psychological horrors of combat, soldiers need that comradery otherwise they'll run off at the first chance they get. There needs to be some anchor keeping the soldier in the way of danger, whether that's social pressure or years of intense training together.
Brett Devereaux has talked about it multiple times on his blog in various different contexts (most recently two weeks ago)[1][2][3]:
I was in the military and in my experience people that chose to go into war zones, it's optional, are fucked in the head and literally enjoy killing people, I've seen it a dozen times. They want to kill.
Not sure what military is being discussed. In the US military, you do not choose to go into combat zones. You receive orders to deploy you to a combat zone.
True, not everyone has such a choice, but I volunteered for the organization I wanted to work for and then I volunteered for multiple deployments I didn't have to go on. Many of us have that choice and make that choice.
"Bringing democracy" is a very weak ideological motivation. I would rather call it plausible deniability. As in "we're doing this to bring democracy" and people might be left with the doubt that it's true.
It is a very weak ideological motivation for people who would never enlist in the first place.
However, I think people are generally too cynical towards a very real belief system.
There are multiple examples of US pushing for democracy against its own interest. Bush with the Hamas Gaza elections, Obama with the Egypt Muslim Brotherhood government and Carter with pre-revolution Iran are such examples
Bush knew what he was doing - Hamas has the influence it has because the US wants it to have it. When Trump decided he wants them to release Israeli hostages he forced them to do it rather quickly, all things considered, showing who really controls Hamas. Restraining American "allies" is key to how America understands its interests and Hamas is an excellent lever to pressure Israel, or Hamas-controlled Gaza wouldn't be flooded with American and European money.
Similarly, Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood because he did; in Ukraine for instance the same admin supported a coup against the elected government (this is not to say that Russia's actions in Ukraine are "justified", it's just a fact.) Democracy has nothing to do with any of this
> Hamas has the influence it has because the US wants it to have it
I doubt this is backed by US intentions and actions historically
> Similarly, Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood because he did
That seems like a tautology to me, care to expand? I vividly remember Obama throwing his autocrat ally under the bus
> in Ukraine for instance the same admin supported a coup
The protests in Ukraine hardly seem like a US coup and were organic according to my understanding, but maybe you can point exactly to the US involvement
"In the late 2010s and early 2020s, Israeli officials encouraged Qatar to support Hamas, especially by approving the transfer of large sums of financial aid by Qatar to the organization. Several Israeli intelligence officials have cited Qatari money as a contributing factor to the success of Hamas in leading the October 7 attacks in 2023; Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the notion that Israel strategically propped up Hamas "ridiculous", and stated that Qatar's aid transfers to the Hamas government had been approved for humanitarian reasons."
I'm not sure how is that related to the original topic.
The events I am describing are a decade to two before the ones you are describing. Back in the early 2000s Qatar was already financing Hamas as well as Al Qaeda (including involvement in 9/11 financing) and Hezbollah in some extent.
Saying Qatar needed Israel's request to start financing ideologically close Islamist terror organizations is certainly the Qatar government line for their involvement, but it's a very shallow analysis of what happened
>The protests in Ukraine hardly seem like a US coup and were organic according to my understanding, but maybe you can point exactly to the US involvement
Most coups are organic. The US involvement in the Iran coup of 1953 was not very much, but the signal of support was meaningful. Ditto Chile in 1973. Ukraine's overthrow was not like those coups. It relied on popular support from the region near the capital. However, this support was not uniform across the country, and support for the protests hovered around 50% and never reached 60%.
>According to a January poll, 45% of Ukrainians supported the protests, and 48% of Ukrainians disapproved of Euromaidan.
>In a March poll, 57% of Ukrainians said they supported the Euromaidan protests.
The polling variation was large. The government was overthrown in February. But the western regions were massively in favor, and surrounded the capital, while the southeast was mostly opposed. Well-functioning states rely on political processes instead of simply overturning the government whenever a majority of citizens opposes it.
Given the polling data and the division of public opinion, I don't support what happened in February 2014. But that doesn't make it a coup -- a coup is a transfer of power that originates specifically within the government, and Ukraine's protests weren't like that. Nor does it justify Russia's invasion. What happened was more like a feudal power struggle. It doesn't help that before new elections could be held, the interim government banned several political parties. Maybe they were "pro-Russian", but democracy means voters deserve a say in a country's geopolitical alignment, so that doesn't seem like a valid reason to ban a political party to me.
>but maybe you can point exactly to the US involvement
Now this sounds like a joke. US politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden and several senators, attended the protests. This makes American support pretty obvious. US media at the time also tended to minimize domestic opposition to the protests, even though this was a significant position within Ukraine.
OP alluded to the Euromaiden protests being an orchestrated Obama-led coup. I still don't see how this is the case. There's some difference between diplomatic reactions to proactive overthrow
that's because they were the ones being threatened, they were at risk, and they did the kill shot as self-protection (putting aside whether they should have been there in the first place). Drone warfare isn't the same thing. People who kill by drone aren't "at war", more often than not now, just killers. Their buddies aren't there, they aren't there, and they were really never at risk of much but being sent to the brig if they defied orders.
This seems like rage bait. You could just as easily make the claim that all soldiers, regardless of their support role, could refuse orders long before they were put in a position that risks their own safety, knowing that in all cases their role would be to support the killing of others.
Not sure why you would construe this as rage bait. I am merely pointing out that by subtracting the actual theatre of war, the "act" of "being in war" is being divorced from actually "being in war". This is no less true than suggesting someone who lost weight by being knocked out cold, going into a coma, and being put on drip fluids for months only to wake up more svelte than when they got beaten up lost weight but wasn't on a weight loss program. Just because it is not pleasant to admit does not negate the fact that it is true.
As to the rest of your comment, everyone who signs up chooses their MOS, and those lacking the choice they want are totally allowed to not enlist in the first place in the U.S.; if there ever is a draft, this likely would not be one of the things those people would be drafted for first, either. If I recall, there is even a rather high signon "bonus" for this MOS, compared to most of the others (that may have changed in the years and years since I last looked though).
In short, noone should enter a military contract thinking you should "feel good" with the idea of killing, though let's be real, noone should be suggesting you should think you won't be expected to; anything but.
My point was, the U.S. and a number of other countries have gamified killing. Adding distance adds dehumanization. That is partly why it is done.
Avoiding any current affairs talk because I am disgusted by how crazy people sound; this stuff has been true though for decades.
The whole cyber thing in the post isn't even about drone careers it is about exploitation careers. But it is related, in a roundabout way. And both "careers" aim to put a remove between real life and the "job". Of course, I could make the argument that they have more in common than people think, but that would be a book not a comment on a thread.
If you haven't checked out Sisela Bok's book on violence and gaming it is a good read, incidentally.
>The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides",
The article talks about 19 people. Given the size of those organizations that's statistically elevated but too small a number to descend into conspiracy theories. As the article points out they apparently had internal warnings and studies about lack of mental support for people in signals intelligence and cyber related roles.
Given that this cluster of deaths seems to have happened in June/July, the Iran war and how the American government has conducted itself I don't find it surprising there's elevated numbers of suicides. You don't need to be on the frontline, if you're in sigint and involved in that attack on the school that casually blew up 150 girls and probably the stuff we don't know about I wouldn't be surprised people off themselves.
> These deaths are most likely due to "housecleaning", as I said.
No, it’s not. It’s very obvious you have no idea of how US military personnel work and live, and the stresses that can be imposed on a person by the function of being in a military. Among those functions such as deployments which can come as a surprise and up root anything you having going on in your life. Or, having to live for several years in highly undesirable locations like Cannon AFB in the middle of no where. These can have a substantial effect on a service member’s mental health. Add in work conditions like working 12 hour shifts in a windowless room. Compounded even further by crappy leadership that you’re stuck with and continuously denies your leave.
No, housecleaning is not more likely. You’re just ignorant of the military life.
From what I see there are only 10 kilometers to a town which has a zoo, mall, church etc. It's not a walk in the park, but with given the zoning laws and car-centric culture of the US, it's not very much.
You might want to actually read the article, then you would see how your descriptions don't actually apply.
Part of the shitty work conditions (that remarkably persist despite incredible amounts of money vanishing in the DoD/W) is your employer being out to kill you should they get the idea of you being insufficiently free of morals or independent thought.
I would argue, that part should worry you far more than your other points.
I talked about the CIA very negatively after having a top secret clearance (never actually used it but it gives useful context). They then showed up in my commune and after a while of unusual behavior and psyops and pretending to be hippies (they couldn’t quite get that right) they resorted to drugging me to get answers they were convinced were true.
I never ordered off the dark web, I do believe my [usa] government can be terrorists, I have purpose and meaning to want to surface truth to find peace because that’s what I believe.
It was a scary time (in Jan - May 2023), and I fled back to parents in VA after which for a while they’d show up with similar personas of odd-people in open community gatherings attempting to get close to me.
I’ve never thought of suicide before and even today have not. When I started sharing about this last spring on hacker news I got a slew of “random” messages and downvotes and people claiming I was sick. I am not mentally ill, I do not need a therapist. It took me several years to process the traumatic experiences and feel the courage to share because I hope it might help someone else going through something similar. I’m thankful for the one person who validated my experience and didn’t gaslight me or attempt to ad hominem/discredit through attack. These suicides very much can occur and I hope can begin to happen less.
Here’s to a random stranger if you read this and are going through something similar, I hope you find peace and safety from these abusers!
That's insulting. And offensive. I think you should be the one asking the psychiatrist or psychologist to diagnose you whatever I deem fit - but, since I'm the one who shared something weird and you hide behind insulting others I don't have the speciality down for to recommend your psychologist.
edit: I can see through your comment history you make a lot of offensive bad faith remarks to people. This is a forum of showing good faith, have you demonstrated that? Maybe you should ask your psychiatrist why you frequent a forum where you can't follow the very clear ruleset of showing good faith.
So is murder and suicide by the CIA. That's very sad too. I hope you never have to experience knowing a family member, friend or a class of people that have been attacked by a group like that - lots of innocents get hurt in crossfire or outright malicious hostility and their experiences can invalidated not too unlike how you have demonstrated today.
Perhaps you can put yourself in someone else's shoes and grow the empathy to see what it's like. Have you ever considered what these innocent people actually experience? Or do you invalidate all of their experiences and say they are all crazy and "it's very sad"? Try saying that to a dead person or a family member who has tried to come forth with what they experienced in outright murder and see that a powerful government-organization just invalidates them.
I suggest you confront your abusive communication and frequent comment history of invalidating others, from your bad faith position where you violate the forum's rules that you frequent. It's hurtful and abusive. I can see that maybe it's easier for some to cope with the evil in the world by just denying it even exists and labeling everyone who experiences it is as just crazy. I can get that not everyone can accept these behaviors are possible in this world and still retain their own position of comfort with themselves and their position in the world. From you though I've experienced no open-mindedness, good faith or ability to acknowledge a perspective different from your own as being possible and I find that lack of empathy as very sad. Good luck.
=====Original thread for preservation=====
> nradov: Has a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist ever evaluated you for paranoid schizophrenia?
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> mannanj That's insulting. And offensive. I think you should be the one asking the psychiatrist or psychologist to diagnose you whatever I deem fit - but, since I'm the one who shared something weird and you hide behind insulting others I don't have the speciality down for to recommend your psychologist. edit: I can see through your comment history you make a lot of offensive bad faith remarks to people. This is a forum of showing good faith, have you demonstrated that? Maybe you should ask your psychiatrist why you frequent a forum where you can't follow the very clear ruleset of showing good faith.
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> nradov: Delusions of persecution by the CIA are a common symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. It's very sad.
I agree that this is an abnormal number of suicides- I don't think anyone is disputing that. I disagree with your suggestion of “housecleaning” though.
I would speculate that the answer is simplier:
DoD “Hacker stuff” kills people. And worse. At scale. The psychological stressors of intelligence work alone is real and extremely high; Cyber Command’s role is not just to know, but to act.
Cyber warfare is escalating faster than they can keep up, global consequences for their actions are high— and they understand the risks better than anyone [1](and can’t talk about it), but they are extremely under resourced, and because of leadership decisions or other factors outside their control, they feel unable to complete their work effectively [2], or are being told to do things they feel are immoral [3].
The most plausible cause of these suicides, and the takeaway I get from this story, is that under the surface of US global military operations, things are bad.
If things are even more stressful than normal under the surface at CYBERCOM and personnel are feeling hopeless enough about it to end their own lives, this should be a red flag for the rest of us.
-
[1] maybe you can imagine having a hands on understanding of the real world impact of critical OT exploits, and being both unable to disclose specific details and also yelling into the void about it for years while no one listens. US water treatment cyber vulnerability is a great example of industry and government lagging so hard that it took an enormous volunteer effort and a decade to begin to address fixing issues which should have been a
“fix it yesterday” all hands on deck priority. https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/07/water-system...
As another example, the US and Israel hacked “nearly all” traffic cameras in Tehran and used them to target and kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now think about the proliferation of internet connected doorbell and traffic cameras in the US… now imagine having an intimate understanding of how cameras can be used to kill people, while watching that risk grow exponentially over a decade, and being helpless to do anything about it because you aren’t allowed to talk about it and no one would believe you that doorbell cameras are a national security threat anyway.
https://www.wired.com/story/from-ukraine-to-iran-hacking-sec...https://www.safehome.org/resources/home-security-industry-an...
The US intelligence community engaging in murdering suspected "weak links" in order to "send a message", "clean the house" etc. is a regularly recurring phenomenon.
The fiction, that intelligence community (among many other places in US government) was some harbor of angelic superior morality, capable of restraining themselves in spite of total lack of effective oversight is certainly "simple". That doesn't make it true.
USCYBERCOM is not the IC, it’s DoD. The majority of CYBERCOM tasked units are cyber protection teams, primarily focused on securing the DoD’s own vast and bloated network infrastructure from attack by foreign adversaries. The rest are split between hunt forward teams, cyber support teams, and the combat mission teams, the latter of which are the only ones that conduct offensive cyberspace operations. This is all literally 101 stuff
"Housecleaning" isn't part of USCYBERCOM, obviously, it belongs to several arms of the (military) IC and is even partly sourced out to private contractors.
Obviously, it's not exactly official.
Did you expect them to announce those activities on their website?
You know, people would be more receptive to you if you wouldn't talk down on them. I mean, for gods' sakes, parent specifically partially agreed with you(!) and yet you *still* talked down to them.
"Partially agreeing" while baselessly denying the central point is what exactly in your book?
You fall for rhetoric tricks at your own expense here. This matter has a host of important consequences and implications. Treating it at the same level of effort as every other infotainment piece is a failure of judgement.
>"Partially agreeing" while baselessly denying the central point is what exactly in your book?
It means partially agreeing, and quite respectfully, I might add. You, however, were only *dis*respectful, downright rude in fact.
>Treating it at the same level of effort as every other infotainment piece is a failure of judgement.
I'm not treating anything as the same as any level of effort. All I'm saying is if you act like a dick, people will be much less likely to give you any attention, even if something you say is correct.
No, it doesn't: it means to mislead people like you into getting the appearance of agreeableness while actually still baselessly denying the salient point.
Denying without giving any rational reason is again a rhetoric trick to gaslight people not trained in applying formal logic into believing something in spite of contradicting evidence.
How do you act here? You attack me personally while adding nothing to the actual topic at hand.
You're right about people who appear more likeable getting more attention. Does that make their standpoint actually more valid or valuable?
>You attack me personally while adding nothing to the actual topic at hand.
My goal was never to contribute to the discussion but merely to explain that your attitude will not win any converts to your arguments.
People are having good discussions in good faith here and you're angry and contemptuous toward them.
Anyway...it seems you have no as much interest in hearing me than you have in admitting your self-sabotaging emotional state. I am done with this topic.
I’m not him, but I did see this post after his post was censored via [FLAGGED]
I have first hand experience being targeted by the CIA after negatively criticizing them and having a former clearance (Pakistani American also, we know how the brass feels about Muslims in terms of racism and the like).
Curious if you’ve heard of the documentary everything is a rich man’s trick and the author who published it spent a lot of effort investigating for it. There’s probably content you can read from him. Do you trust that sort of information?
Of course there is, but what difficulties can you possibly have finding it?
Part of the problem with events like these is people's "incredulity", which is fundamentally rooted in them not being force-fed with the topic by the media despite the importance.
The other way around, while people baselessly believe to be told everything of importance by their news-feed, in reality they are entirely being left in the dark about truly important matters simply by not "pushing" them in headlines.
The stories exist, you simply don't get them effortlessly.
That attitude of passive complacency has to change.
Look in this thread, the good links are usually those far down.
I ctrl-Fed for "http" in this post and looked through the 61 links, following several of them that seemed like they may be relevant. I didn't find anything that appeared talked about what you've mentioned in your posts. Some talked about deaths, but I didn't find anything that even insinuated that they were carried about by or on behalf of the intelligence community.
I also did a web search for "intelligence community housecleaning" and looked through the top 60 results. I didn't find much. Several references talked about people being fired, but I didn't find any about them being killed.
I'd like to think I'm reasonably intelligent and web-literate, but after 15-20 minutes I didn't find what I was looking for. Maybe I'm just going about it the wrong way? Given how much you've posted on the topic, it seems like you want to convince people; if so, could you post some sources directly?
If you dig there, you'll sooner or later hit upon the weird discrepancies from reality that Wikipedia article has. It mixes unrelated cases with genuinely disturbing ones like McCasland. Who wasn't demented at all.
"Housecleaning" refers to the practice of killing prospective leaks. It doesn't make much sense to kill them once they've talked.
Killing is a last resort, mundane leaks are retaliated against by revoking clearances and destroying careers that way.
Note that the Espionage Act of 1917(!) allows to treat whistleblowers like foreign spies and deprives them of arguing, their leak would serve the common interest.
Actual cases are usually ruled "suicides" or "accidents", but obviously aren't:
Danny Casolaro (1991): "The Octopus" Investigation
Gary Webb (2004): The "Dark Alliance" Expose
Dr. David Kelly (2003): Iraq War WMD Leaker
John P. Wheeler III (2010): Pentagon Insider
... there are many others. You only find what you look for.
I want to read your original claim but it was censored. I am aware of the IC community being active on these forums and using algorithm/actors to downvote and hide information.
> One of the dead was Technical Sergeant Kevin Stallings, a digital network intelligence analyst whose family told Bloomberg they wanted him to be identified to bring greater attention to the suicides. Stallings was stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, Cyber Command’s headquarters. He took his own life the month before he’d have turned 37.
These people aren't "drone operators", they worked for USCYBERCOM, which does "hacker stuff".
The narrative peddled here repeatedly, the statistics were "completely normal" is egregiously wrong.
The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides", while the far more likely explanation is "housecleaning": murdering potential whistleblowers.
Yes. I saw that post, it was still up. I can see that being true.
Did you see my posts?
I was targeted by the CIA or an intel agency, as a pakistani-american US citizen who has committed no crimes and only spoke up against calling my own government's agency terrorists. I saw what I could describe as behavior online resembling deep state astroturfing and fake accounts, and later agents showed up to experiment on me. I have been wondering if the odd behavior is that resembling a group that wants to try to houseclean me. This isn't a made up instance and you can look through my comment history for examples of how accounts that seem odd show up and in lock-step discredit and attack me. I think this is more evidence for your perspective being possible and not to feel gaslight and made out to be crazy.
a quick search engine query 'is venting healthy' leads to results suggesting that venting (emotionally talking about things that affect mental health) is not necessarily an entirely positive behaviour. so the challenged statement is at least partially true. just wanted to share that the sarcasm looks abit silly coz it's not a clear cut situation
the problem statement regarded 'talking about mental health'. venting is one form of talking about mental health. paying therapists is another form of talking about mental health. neither of these weakens the other. concomitantly, neither of these can have their positivity be extrapolated to the overarching point, as their positivities contradict. final result = ambiguity, we cannot conclusively state that talking about mental health is a universally positive pursuit. hence I pointed out you looked a bit funny coz sarcasm is best employed for that which can't be argued ... and we just argued. thanks & all the best
You can't hand wave "do your own research" when you make a bold, and frankly obviously incorrect, claim.
You can only do that hand waving when you say something most people already know to be true. "The sky is blue" -> okay, do your own research. "Pigs can fly" -> either show a research paper or shut up, you're wasting everyone's brain cells.
This isn't an argument. But, to dig deeper: I think it will feel negative at first because, obviously, addressing negative emotions is a negative experience. But introspection is really about knowledge. Being ignorant to yourself, of all things, does not breed positivity, it breeds masking, deception, and self-destruction.
A lot of men, and women too, have horribly self-destructive tendencies. For many men, their biggest enemy is themselves. And it's a vicious cycle, where every time they pick themselves up, they pick up the metaphorical shotgun and blow off their own foot. In order to fix these tendencies, we must first identify them. That's actually the hardest part. Most self-destructive people don't know they are self-destructive, which is why the problem is allowed to continue. In order to identify the tendencies, we require fierce introspection. Introspection is a combination of radical honesty and analysis.
Self-destruction breeds insecurity, jealousy, anger, violence, dissociation, and an inflated sense of self. Practically all the losers and bums you see around are really just self-destructive. They could do better, but they choose not to, because they don't think they deserve it. They view themselves as losers and bums, and so they are so.
How do people know if they're self-destructive? If they repeatedly have failed relationships. If they abuse substances or food. If they repeatedly run to the same behavior as a coping mechanism. The gym is a common one for men. If they chronically make poor decisions. If they push people away. And, if they're not able to talk about their feelings or be vulnerable.
These problems are not innate, they can be fixed. But it's 100% impossible to fix a problem you can't even identify. So, talk about it. Talking to someone trusted can aide your introspection process. Although, nobody can do the work for anybody else. Ultimately, it comes from within.
And, I will say, if you don't have the practice, it is hard. Very, very hard to talk about your feelings. That's a sign, though. Nothing worth doing is easy. You don't have to be a slave to your emotions, where they come and go and do as they please with your body and mind. They aren't some other mystical thing that cannot be spoken about. You create them. So, you need to understand them. Only then can you control them. And, never mistake masking, coping or ignorance for control. They are the complete absence of control.
Diet and exercise are both clinically proven to help mental health. That does not make them complete, however. In clinical trials, medication + diet and exercise worked better than either alone.
Faith isn't really a cure for anything, and many mental health issues are caused by faith, because many religious organizations use fear and shame as tools. Most encourage simply covering up mental health issues or just pretending they don't exist. Both exacerbate, not solve, mental health issues.
Yes, I know many. Of course everyone has minor mental health problems but I know many who have basically cured mental health problems from depression to crippling OCD. None of them did it purely with counciling but with a vast combination of life experiances, including becoming more prosperous and being able to afford to excercise and enjoy a good diet and not have to worry about losing everything and starving to death (this was a big one for mental health), having children, success giving them self confidence, growing older and having their hormones change, having time seperate them from trauma, drugs, legal and illegal, hooking up with someone who somehow made them feel better, study of human culture, history and psychology to get a new perspective on themselves, and finally finishing their dissertations.
On the other hand, you're approaching tautology with what you seem to be implying here, which is "flaws or challenges that you can fix yourself aren't mental health problems".
There is such a thing as the “Mental Health Industrial Complex”.
How did humans evolve and survive for hundreds of thousands of years without “mental health issues” and suddenly 23% of children in public schools have a diagnosis.
The same way they survived and evolved for hundreds of thousands of years with cancer and different bacterial infections and viruses and congenital defects: they suffered from them, sometimes died from them. They didn't lack mental health issues, they just lived or died with them unaddressed or poorly addressed.
I'm personally acquainted with multiple people who figured out that their mental health symptoms were downstream effects of natural phenomena (diet incompatible with genotype, insufficient sunlight exposure, excessive work stress, etc), with resultant drastic improvement of mental condition after root cause rectification. any reason in particular for you to have asked?
you didn't answer me directly, I'm not obliged either. MTHFR (and possibly COMT) are examples where genotype directly influences nutrient absorption. when the human body is unaligned (poor nutrient absorption, improper physical engagement, etc), symptoms such as depression and mania are expected behaviour. your link is a list of similar symptoms grouped under labels. I find it more pertinent to assess individual symptoms and progress from there.
sometimes mental conditions are temporary and resolvable. sometimes mental conditions are permanent and symptom alleviation is the best option. both are true. we are assessing the interface to the entire body here, all traffic flows through this node to a certain degree. problematic traffic can be caused by an issue local to the central node, but this possibility does not exclude the potential for data to be problematic on arrival.
I'm not him, but most mental illnesses are exacerbated by excessive stress. For example depression, anxiety, and OCD. What causes stress varies person to person.
For example, consider you have inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Some food causes you pain, discomfort, and stress. Over time, eating the wrong diet can worsen your anxiety. You might fear going out and having fun, because you have to use the bathroom too much. Then, in that sense, a diet incompatible with your genotype triggers your anxiety disorder.
Or consider a stressful job, like being in the military. That might trigger or cause PTSD. Then, later down the line, another stressful job might trigger that PTSD.
As a man who has cured (inasmuch as something like that word is valid in this context) mental health problems with the help of therapy, I'll raise my hand as an example.
Personal perspective, but I'd argue there are an entire class of mental health problems that are perspective-based.
I.e. I am acting in a way that is harmful to myself and/or others because I see the situation in a maladaptive way.
Talk therapy (with a sufficiently intelligent and skilled therapist, of which there is a great lack vs demand) can be effective at changing perspectives, which can ultimately allow changing the behaviors they create.
Some mental health problems are biochemical, but there are a lot that are just "The way you see the world is making you an asshole. Don't want to be an asshole? Try seeing it a different way."
I've successfully addressed several issues with a therapist. I know other men who've also done it. It's about the same as getting a doctor's help with a physical issue--some easily fixed, some taking time and effort, some stubborn that seem to resist all attempts.
What most people cannot comprehend, for some very bizarre reason, is that many chronic problems do not have one-time solutions. They require chronic solutions.
Take alcoholism. The "cure" for alcoholism is never drinking. You never stop being an alcoholic, you can only manage it by not drinking.
Take obesity. Obesity has no "cure" either in that sense. The "cure" for obesity is diet and exercise management, forever, until the day you die. It's like taking a pill, every day, forever, until you die. If you one day decide to stop taking the pill of diet and exercise, you will be obese again. In that sense, the obesity never left you, merely it's symptoms left you temporarily while you managed it.
Mental health is the same way. There is no magic "oh now I'll never be sad or anxious again!". No. You manage it every day, forever, until the day you die. You manage it via therapy, behavior modification, and medication. If you stop doing that, it will come back, because it never left you. It's a chronic condition, like being a brunette.
Yes, true, although for GLP-1s the current status-quo is still "chronic solution" category.
Although, and this is controversial, I view GLP-1s as a more "root cause" solution for obesity than diet and exercise. The "root cause" of obesity is not overconsumption, that's the symptom. The root cause is a propensity to over-consume, which GLP-1s address, whereas diet and exercise alone do not. We do not fully understand why some people have a greater propensity to over-consume.
But, if I had to speculate a little, I would say overconsumption has had an evolutionary advantage for humans for all of our existence, until right now. And, indeed, I would say the evolutionary advantage extends to almost all organisms, so it might be baked in at very "low levels" of our anatomy.
rephrased for ease of interpretation - venting about a problem is nice just as stretching a muscle is nice. stretching doesn't fix the root cause of muscle soreness though, just as venting does nothing to fix the issue. emotionally re-reacting is likely to result in strengthening of existing associations, which is more likely to cause repetition of a problem scenario, as opposed to leading to scenario avoidance.
"talking about your mental health" does not mean re-parroting your trauma. there's understanding, re-framing, forgiving, all kind of other things that go beyond the limited belief that talking just calcifies trauma.
Yes, me. I suffered some serious depression that I cured through therapy and medication. Discussing it openly with my family and friends certainly helped.
As the saying goes, recognizing that you have a problem is the first step to being able to solve it.
venting is a form of talking about mental health. there are other forms that the problem statement doesn't apply to, like your examples. but the statement does apply to my example, therefore we can't say that talking about mental health is exclusively a positive behaviour.
Can you think of anything you can do that is exclusively a positive behavior? Drinking water in excess kills you, excess breathing kills you, excess exercise kills you, I think the logic here can be used to sow the seeds of uncertainty in nearly anything, honestly.
They never said anything remotely like that in their comment. You're actively lying about their words in addition to badly breaking the HN guidelines. You should re-read them:
The Air Force did something shockingly reasonable (according to the newspaper coverage): they require all pilots to attend mandatory counseling sessions. Then there was no sign of weakness or any of that toxic nonsense. “Ugh, guess I have to go talk to the doc today, and I don’t want to, but guess orders are orders.”