- 3 months ago
Brian Castner is a former explosive ordnance disposal officer, or EOD officer, who served in the Air Force during the war in Iraq. Castner deployed twice, in 2004 and 2006, as a commander of an EOD unit at the Balad and Kirkuk air bases, respectively.
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00:00My name is Brian Kastner. I'm a former Explosive Ordnance Disposal Officer.
00:05Since leaving the Air Force, I travel around the world to conflict areas
00:09to investigate war crimes, and this is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:13The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were IED wars, improvised munitions, improvised devices.
00:20You just had to assume that there was a bomb somewhere at your feet that you had not found yet.
00:26The work is tough. I mean, anyone who does this work can't say that they're not affected by it.
00:35You would be inhuman to not be affected by it.
00:43The joke about cutting the red wire. It's funny how consistent it is. Obviously, the wire colors have
00:50absolutely no correspondence to absolutely anything. But no, you don't cut the red one. You actually
00:56don't cut any of them. The biggest misconception of Hollywood when it comes to EOD is this idea that
01:02you have to be crazy to do the work and that the people doing the work and working with explosives
01:08are somehow off in some way. That perception is pervasive. It's even all the way to the Hurt Locker,
01:16which won the Academy Award. To have EOD be a subject of a film with that stature, on the one hand,
01:24is incredible. And on the other, it makes us look like reckless cowboys with a death wish,
01:31which could not be further from the truth. So the drama of the film is this increasingly risky
01:38behavior. And this idea that, yeah, of taking any risk, not having a sense of self-preservation,
01:48the first couple minutes of the film of an actual EOD operation is correct. That said,
01:54everything in between the first few minutes and the last few minutes is Hollywood and makes a good
01:59movie. I think maybe something that the public doesn't understand about the EOD profession is the
02:04amount of time we spend memorializing and remembering everyone that we've lost.
02:11So we have the EOD Warrior Foundation that raises money for the children of men and women that we've
02:19lost in all wars. We have a memorial wall down in Florida. So you go to school, to EOD school,
02:28every day passing the wall of all of the names of every man and woman who has died in the line of
02:35duty from World War II through to today. And so when there's a representation in the public of EOD being
02:46risky, cavalier, cowboys, there's maybe an association or an implication or something that there's so many
02:56people with their name on the wall who died in combat because they were that way, that they were
03:04risky, that they just did whatever and weren't paying attention. And it couldn't be further from the truth.
03:16I first deployed to Iraq at the end of 2004. I went to Balad Air Base, which is just north of Baghdad.
03:25I did one tour there. And then I went back to Iraq in Kirkuk for 2006 and then did a tour there.
03:34And I mean, this sounds so naive now, but I was excited. And I was excited because
03:43I had been training for years to do a thing and I was finally going to be able to do that thing.
03:48And that's a very, you know, 27-year-old's version of looking at that. So I was the flight commander
03:57of the EOD unit. A flight is roughly equivalent to a company. And we were there to support 1st Brigade
04:04of the 101st Airborne Division. And so as the equivalent of the company commander, I'm going to
04:10have a chief who's my number two. We're going to have an ops center. And then we're going to have a number
04:14of teams. And a team is three people. And they're going to be divided out either to different fobs,
04:20forward operating bases, or they're going to be assigned to route clearance packages.
04:25The route clearance teams are basically combat engineers with EOD assigned, whose whole job it
04:31was just to drive the highways and get blown up. Or hopefully not get blown up, but find the device
04:37and take it apart. And so they would just drive the highway before the logistics movements would go
04:43to be able to clear that out. And then we had emergency response teams, quick reaction teams, QRF,
04:49quick reaction force teams, however you want to call it, a couple in Kirkuk, and then some at the
04:54outlying fobs. IEDs, improvised explosive devices, are just that. They are put together by a bomber,
05:03a bit of wire here, and a radio, and a main charge of an artillery shell, and maybe some sort of arming
05:11switch or something else that goes into that. It's improvised because it's just made for that one
05:19attack. IEDs are a very, very particular solution to a problem that the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan
05:27had, which is that they did not have their own military equipment to challenge the US military.
05:34There was an occupation. There was US military on the road running around. It was hard for them to
05:41target in the bases. It's hard for them to shoot down aircraft. But there was a weak spot that was
05:47being exploited, and that is these vehicles physically rolling down the road. It's another reason IEDs became
05:54so popular, is that consumer electronics with wireless technology exploded at the same time
06:01that these wars are really getting going. So there are just more and more things you can buy off the
06:08shelf where I push a button here and something happens over there. And so then I can modify the
06:13thing happening over there to instead of a beep going off or a noise or whatever the case may be,
06:21I can modify that to now a device is going off. And as the wars went on, the job got a lot more
06:29dangerous because the bombers or the emplacers, the people building the devices and putting them in,
06:34they were often placing secondary and tertiary devices that were meant to target the people
06:39coming to clear the first device. They had been watching for long enough that they knew our trends,
06:45even as we tried to mix them up and do different things. We were always changing up what we would do,
06:50but the bomber was changing that fast as well. And so my number one concern when arriving on scene was not
07:02the package that was called in. That's easy. I know where that is. My number one job was making myself
07:08safe and my team safe and our security escort safe and the people that lived in the area safe immediately
07:15upon arriving on scene because you just had to assume that there was a bomb somewhere at your feet
07:23that you had not found yet. Really, our job at the end of the day is to take apart every device.
07:28It didn't matter who it was targeting. It was a car bomb at a school. It was a car bomb at a daycare.
07:34We took apart a number of those. At a certain point, you're just trying to make everyone safe. And so,
07:39yes, that particular roadside bomb was meant to target a US convoy. True. However, it was just as
07:47likely to hit a civilian truck that happened to be driving by trying to take melons to market. And I
07:52think that there's understanding that mental aspect is important even when you're out operating
08:01every day in combat. Because this may sound funny, it's easy to get complacent. Well, yeah,
08:08there's probably an IED out here, whatever. You are constantly mentally battling, staying on the edge.
08:14There's a reason that we pull up. We do what's called five and 25. You check within five meters
08:20of your vehicle. You check within 25 meters of your vehicle. You get the robot. You go through these
08:25steps. You don't want to be rote. You don't want to just be formulaic and do the same thing every
08:30time. You don't want to do everything the same way. They're going to be watching. They're going to
08:34change something. That's going to get you killed. So something I learned in school is to visualize.
08:40And this is something that pro athletes do, Olympians and people that are really operating at a high
08:45level. And it's something I learned from one of the instructors. You would visualize the night
08:49before what you're going to do the next day. The tools that we relied on first and foremost
08:59was the robot. The robot is there to physically walk up to the thing, take it apart, use the gripper,
09:07do the stuff that you can't do in a safe way. We use a lot of other tools. We use jammers to try to
09:12keep the bomber from being able to blow it up remotely. Something that may be surprising is that
09:17the best way to take apart an explosive device without it going off is to use explosives yourself,
09:24to use an energetic tool, we would call it, to try to get it to disassemble without detonating.
09:31So sometimes those explosive tools are carried down by the robot. You put it in the gripper
09:36and it drives down and it's putting it near the device, and then we can set it off from a long
09:40distance. In the typical operation from Iraq, your robot is checking out, doing a recon,
09:49seeing what's needed, coming back, picking up a tool and dropping it in a certain place to get
09:55the effect you want. The first thing you do is you send in a robot, and if your robot blows up,
09:59send in another robot, and if that robot blows up, I will drive you a third robot before a person walks
10:05down. Because if you thought about it, losing a $250,000 robot is way, way better than losing a
10:12person. Sometimes you're walking around and you stumble upon the thing and you realize that there's a
10:17device at your feet and you need to take an action immediately right then to save your own life.
10:22But to be 100 yards away and say a person needs to go and do this thing, that is the gravest decision.
10:33Walking down yourself is pretty lonely. It's called the long walk for a reason. In that moment,
10:40the thing that lets you do that is a certain confidence which is born of your training and
10:47your skills and your knowledge and the belief that you're doing the safest possible thing in that
10:52moment. We've lost a lot of men and women that way. I mean, we didn't lose those people because they
11:01were making an offhanded, you know, cavalier choice. We lost them because it was still the safest thing
11:08to do and it still got them killed. As the war went on, I mean, people just got sick of getting
11:20blown up all the time. And at a certain point, you say, we just need to stop this. You can only,
11:26you can only have your convoy blown up every day for so long before you say, we should really catch
11:34the person who's doing this. When I was first at Balad on my first tour, I remember being asked to go
11:41and do a post-blast investigation like first week there. And our answer was, what's that? And we drove
11:48out there and we looked at the hole and we said, yep, something went off there. And like, what do you
11:53want us to do? We just didn't have the capacity at that time. And then gradually you build these
11:59task forces. We had weapons intelligence teams. We had a unit called SEXI, the Combined Explosive
12:05Exploitation Cell in Baghdad. You had FBI labs. You had all of this stuff in this infrastructure
12:15to do the real forensic analysis on exactly how they were made. What's their capability?
12:20What can they do? Where did they come from? And not just from a detailed
12:26technical standpoint, but from an emotional standpoint, how do human beings work? How do they
12:33tend to enter a room, leave a room? Do you, do you leave a car running? Do you like these little
12:39bits of human behavior and how that would figure into a scene, understanding those motivations and
12:45recreating that scene? That is really the, I don't know, that's the heart of the work.
12:51One of my first incidents at Kirkuk, we had explosively formed penetrators. So these are an
12:58Iranian provided weapon that are made to basically punch through armor. And they were relatively rare at
13:05the time. They got more and more common through 2007. And if we had found those a year before,
13:11we probably would've blown them up. And this time we saved them and we packed them in a crate. And I
13:16got on a helicopter to Baghdad the next day to specifically deliver these things, to do the real
13:22forensic analysis. Everything down to like the little rivets and the little caps to be like, oh yeah,
13:29we've seen this rivet before. That's, that's not something we knew how to do at the beginning of the war.
13:33And it's only something we learned over the course of it. So my job as the commander is obviously to
13:40keep all my team safe, organize and lead and provide them the equipment that they need to work. We never
13:47lost anyone on my tours. I'm, I'm proud of that. At the same time, the people that we, you know, lost in
13:54the EOD family generally, that doesn't mean that any of those folks did anything wrong.
14:00Luck is a massive part of this. We had a saying that you need five things to get through Iraq,
14:08luck, training, luck, equipment, and luck. And I would always rather be lucky than good. You can't
14:14do the work if you're not, not just physically safe, but have the feeling of it. You can't control
14:20the fact that you're in Iraq. You can't control the fact that the US is fighting a war in Iraq.
14:25You can't control your assignment. There are so many things outside of your control.
14:32And so you have to come to peace with that and focus on the things that you can.
14:42I think there's two main sets of character traits for the kind of person that goes into EOD.
14:47One of it is a combination of mental acuity and physical handiness. It's like being a surgeon,
14:57except if you fail, then you die and not the patient. And the kind of person that gets into that
15:03has to be book smart, has to do math, has to understand physics, has to be really analytical
15:09and attention to detail. The other part of it though, is just, there's a certain attitude or a certain
15:15smart assery, if I can call it that. So I got an electrical engineering degree. I was not a great
15:22engineer. When you're an engineer, you see like your alarm clock and you're like, you're really
15:26curious how it works. And so you take it apart and then you put it back together. The EOD tech sees
15:31the alarm clock, takes it all apart, maybe with a hammer, and then can't be bothered to put it back
15:36together. And that's much more me. So I did Air Force ROTC. I got a scholarship when I was 17 to go
15:45to college at Marquette and get an electrical engineering degree and the Air Force paid for it.
15:50It was a very different world. When I actually graduated college, joined the military in 2000 again,
15:56I was interested in EOD. So I got to EOD school in February of 2003. So the invasion of Afghanistan
16:06had already happened in Iraq was coming quickly and we knew it was coming. And my eyes were wide
16:11open that I was not joining a profession that would be sleepy and I would just do my time in the military
16:19and move on. I knew that I was going into something where combat was coming quickly because of the
16:25training. In EOD, everybody attends the same school. So it's Navy School Explosive Ordnance Disposal
16:31at Eglin Air Force Base, which is Fort Walton Beach, Destin area, and the Panhandle of Florida.
16:36And that school takes seven to 12 months, depending, and it all happens right there.
16:43Yeah, the hardest part of EOD school is the pace. The first day you basically do
16:53all of physics and then you take a test the next day. And then the next day,
16:59you do all of math and you take a test the next day. Just the pace, it is relentless.
17:05Then the next section is demolitions and you start working with explosives very, very quickly.
17:10And that's because the school needs to figure out if you're going to freak out or not. And there are
17:17some people that the first time they pick up a blasting cap, they can't touch it. Or the feeling
17:26of putting a bunch of C4 together and putting out on a pile of bombs and landmines or what else
17:32you're getting rid of. You are standing on top of your own death. And some people just the feeling
17:39of that is like too much. And you're like, I'm done. I'm out of here. It's DOR, drop on request.
17:45You have to be a volunteer to do EOD. If it's not right for you, you should not be in it.
17:50So you need an 85% on your test to pass. And a lot of the questions or a lot of the things you might
17:59do in a physical test are worth 16 points. So you do this one thing, you fail. And that reflects
18:05really the nature of the work. You do any one of these things and it's going to kill you in real life.
18:10In our class specifically, 30 of us started together and three of us finished. No matter what
18:17basic things you learn in EOD school, there is no preparation for the bomber who is building
18:24devices in your neighborhood and is putting them out on the street corner at the first time you
18:29drive down the road. And there's no way to prepare for that because that particular bomber is also
18:38changing his, most likely his designs all the time.
18:47After I got out of the military, I became a contractor. I became a journalist. I was covering
18:55war in a different way. So I joined Amnesty in 2018, March of 2018. You know, I was initially
19:03hired as the weapons investigator and as a military analyst. We're a watchdog because the work that
19:08we're doing is trying to keep as many civilians safe and free of harm as possible. The risks to being
19:15an investigator with Amnesty in a conflict area is very different than when you're in the military.
19:24Being in the military and being in an armored vehicle and being in uniform obviously makes you a
19:29target, but you also have the entire U.S. military behind you if you're being attacked and something
19:36happens. It's almost exactly the inverse as an investigator with Amnesty, where you are there
19:44with very little support except your own wits. You know, a little bit of money, your friends and
19:51network and your ability to blend in and your ability to essentially not get noticed to the
19:59maximum extent possible. The biggest risks then change. They are kidnapping. They are normal banditry
20:08in some places. They are being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you are drawing attention to
20:14yourself, you are making yourself a target. You need a reason for no one to notice you. And so
20:24I try to do things so I am, yes, always blending in. So I arrived in Kabul in July of 2021.
20:33And the reason that I and my colleague went is because the Taliban were winning. And as they were
20:40winning, there were a number of violations and crimes. It was our understanding that were happening
20:47in the course of that. People caught in the crossfire between the Taliban and the Afghan National Army,
20:52people that died in U.S. airstrikes that had occurred recently, and then crimes committed by the
20:57Taliban. There were a number of massacres, targeted killings, executions. And so we were documenting
21:05that and we were planning on leaving, except every day the Taliban were getting closer and
21:13provincial capitals started to fall. We tried to leave and we couldn't. We had tickets to leave Kabul
21:21the day after Kabul ended up falling. So that morning, the 15th of August, we had a plan.
21:28We had tickets to fly out the next day. Our plan was to essentially hope that the Afghan National
21:36Army would hold Kabul for some amount of time and that essentially we were going to go to the airport
21:43as early as possible, essentially the night before,
21:45and then stay overnight at the airport and fly out early in the next day. The U.S. had announced
21:52that they were sending troops to hold the airport. No one had a better option. And so that morning,
22:01the 15th, you know, we're packed up, we're ready to go. We're planning to leave later that day.
22:07And then there's gunshots immediately outside our compound, like, I mean, steps away from our compound.
22:16The hotel staff run out armed, everybody heads to a safe room, and basically all the plans changed
22:23immediately, which was, we're not going to the airport tonight. We are going to the airport right
22:28this second. We got out of the safe room, we got in a car, we drove the back roads, main highways,
22:35are absolutely through Kabul, are absolutely packed. The Afghan National Army had essentially disappeared.
22:41The Afghan police had disappeared. You could see, like, uniforms just left on the side of the road.
22:48It's kind of every person for themselves at that point. We got to the airport that night or that
22:55evening before dark, and there was absolutely a feeling like, okay, we're here. We don't see the
23:02Americans, but they're here somewhere. The US has promised that they are setting up a secure area
23:08here. We're good now. And, you know, we waited and we had a plan to sleep and stay overnight,
23:14and we did our check-ins and whatever else. And then after dark, we noticed that people in the concourse
23:23start moving kind of closer into the main part of the international airport. We would learn later,
23:31there's two sides to the Kabul airport. There's a civilian side in the south and the military
23:36side up in the north. Early evening, we get word, there's rumors spread extremely fast,
23:44that the Taliban had entered the airport. Basically, all of the security disappeared. If you can imagine,
23:50like, the outside of the Kabul airport, in some ways looks, at the time, looked like any other
23:56airport. Like, you had to go through a metal detector. Like, you had to go through the equivalent
24:01of TSA to get inside. There's still, like, people checking passports. There's still people working
24:07at the front desk, right, of the various airlines. And then imagine, like, walking back out through the
24:14hallway and, like, everybody's gone. Like, every security official is gone. And it essentially
24:21turned into a free-for-all. It was pretty clear that the flights the next day were not happening.
24:26You know, just the rumor of the Taliban entering was enough to, like, basically sow this chaos.
24:33And so me and my colleague, we're grabbing our stuff, and we're essentially out on the tarmac.
24:38We're out on, you know, where planes are parked. People are trying to rush to get onto aircraft,
24:44civilian aircraft that are sitting there. There's some armed guards that are pushing people out.
24:48It's completely dark. I have a friend who's a journalist who has made it to the military side.
24:56And he's like, you need to get over here. And I'm looking across, and I can see the tails of the C-17s,
25:02the American C-17s. And he's like, which side are you on? And I'm like, I'm on the civilian side.
25:06He's like, you need to be over here. And so me and my amnesty colleague, we ran across the runway.
25:13And we get, we're, you know, moving across, and we're in the grass. And then we're, like,
25:19on a parking apron. And then we're in the grass again. And all of a sudden, you know, these lights
25:27pop on. And it's like, it's an American armored vehicle. And I do one of these things, like holding
25:33my passport. And the guy I'm with does one of these things, holding the passport. And, you know,
25:41we're just lucky we didn't get shot, essentially. And so we get picked up by the Americans. And they
25:48basically said, what in the hell are you doing here? And we said, the Taliban are in the civilian
25:53side of the airport. And they said, what are you talking about? More and more people started to come
25:59to then it was like hundreds of people crossing the airfield. And these are the videos that you saw.
26:04We ended up having to go and essentially getting ourselves rearrested, so to speak, like, you know,
26:11pick us up and, you know, eventually got on military flights out of Kabul. We published that report
26:18in December, several months later. And we I mean, we included essentially everything that we were able
26:28to prove up until the fall of Kabul, including U.S. drone strike on a car in a Kabul neighborhood
26:35that the U.S. thought was a car bomb and was not. And they killed a number of people. Many,
26:40many civilians died in the course of the fighting over that summer up until the day that Kabul fell.
26:55I and a small team, we entered Ukraine a few days after the war started in February of 2022 is when
27:03the full scale invasion of Ukraine began. And we set up in Lviv, which is in far western Ukraine.
27:10And the reason we set up there is because we simply didn't know how far and how fast the Russians were
27:17going to get in from the eastern border. So we set up in Lviv and we were interviewing people that had
27:25fled from the east. We were the first to prove to have physical evidence of the use of cluster munitions,
27:32cluster munitions being, you know, weapons that disperse these small submunitions over a wide area.
27:39They're banned under international law for a number of reasons. Cluster munitions are a category of
27:45weapons that's deployed in two stages. You have a carrier and that carrier could be a missile, could be a
27:51bomb, a clamshell bomb. It could be an artillery round or something else. But it's fired into an area and then
27:59that carrier opens and it spreads many, many submunitions, bomblets, cluster munitions over a
28:07wide area. And depending on the type, this can be an area the size of a football field or even larger.
28:14You can't aim where all these little bomblets are going. So by their nature, they might hit a military
28:19target. They might hit civilians that are nearby because they're just randomly falling wherever the
28:24air takes them. They also tend to have a high dud rate. And by that, I mean some of them detonate,
28:30but some of them don't. And what that means is, you know, 200 of these fall in an area, maybe only
28:3880% of them detonate, 90%. That could be 20 or 40 submunitions that are just sitting there with
28:45sensitive fuses that really might detonate. If you kick them, if you pick them up, if you accidentally brush
28:52buy one, the fuses are extremely dangerous. And so there's a convention against the use,
28:59stockpile, manufacture of cluster munitions. And unfortunately, the United States, for example,
29:03is not a state party. So we had kind of rented a flat in one of the neighborhoods downtown,
29:09and we're interviewing people in the flat. And he like, you know, pulls out a piece of the frag that
29:16a surgeon had pulled out of him. And, you know, I'm taking photographs with a little,
29:20you know, a little ruler or whatever else to prove that those were 9N-235 or 9N-210 submunitions.
29:27We're trying to gather that physical evidence and the testimony and where were you
29:31and trying to build that case that, yes, on this particular day, at this particular time,
29:37this weapon was used in this place, killed or injured this civilian. That's the heart of the work.
29:43So to identify weapons, we're looking for pieces that have what we call key ID features. And what
29:50that means is what is on this weapon that is on no other weapon. So we have what's called an
29:56ordinance order of battle. And that's a military term that basically says, what are all the weapons that
30:00are being used in this conflict? And what are their sources? When I was in Mykolaiv in July of 2022,
30:10at that point, Russia still was occupying Kherson. And the front was between Mykolaiv and Kherson.
30:19And it was an extremely active front. So there were many evenings or nights where you would hear an
30:24explosion or two that would interrupt your sleep. And that was normal. But there was one particular
30:31night where it got to be early in the morning, four or five in the morning, I don't remember
30:35exactly when, where there was a detonation that was way, way, way too close. And of course,
30:40you shoot straight out of bed and you're looking for the bomb shelters. There were a couple more
30:46impacts. And then of course, first thing in the morning, as soon as it's light, we're out to try to
30:50figure out, you know, what had happened. Cause again, that was way too close. Those 220 millimeter
30:56rockets had dropped cluster munitions, but it was only a couple hundred meters away from,
31:01from our hotel. Uh, there was a hospital complex that was nearby. So we essentially
31:06spent the morning identifying craters in these particular submunitions. They splash is what it
31:12looks like. There's like a shallow crater and then a ring of fragmentary divots, you know,
31:19if it hits asphalt or concrete, especially some of them are duds. And so we're taking photos of the
31:24duds. Some of them are, um, you know, had detonated, they had detonated on the hospital grounds. We are
31:31collecting evidence to hopefully guide international justice later. But, you know, I, when I find a piece
31:39of frag that, um, you know, that was used when I'm out digging in a hole and I pull up one of those
31:45pieces of blue arrow seven frag, I don't take it home as a war souvenir. I dig it out of the hole.
31:51I identify it and I leave it for others. The only way you're going to find out what happened is by
31:58talking to people. If you can build some rapport and some trust, people will tell you things that,
32:05like, we never would have known when I was in the military. For all of the fancy Intel streams that the
32:12US government has, I don't know a substitute for speaking to the person that lived next door.
32:20The Mariupol theater bombing is an excellent example of how challenging this work is.
32:25So in March of 2022, the Russians attacked the drama theater in central Mariupol. This was like
32:32a major opera house, a major cultural landmark in the very center of the city. And that theater,
32:39because of the sturdiness of its construction, had served as a shelter for people that were trying
32:45to flee fighting in other parts of the city. And the Russians struck it with one or two very large
32:50aircraft bombs and killed a number of people there. You know, we spoke to dozens of people that were
32:58there, had been there, had family members there, had been there themselves at the time of the strike.
33:03There were a lot of conspiracy theories. The Russians were saying, oh, it was a false flag. The Ukrainians
33:09put a device inside their own building. And so the challenge was to find people from Mariupol. We
33:18can't get to Mariupol itself. It's being attacked. Find people that had been at the theater. Find people
33:24that had been at the theater when it was struck. And then people that could actually name victims that
33:31they know their family member was killed. The things that we had to do, we, you know, we found the
33:38plans, the original architectural plans for the theater through a number of sources. And then we
33:45have these plans in front of us so we can get on the phone with people and talk for hours and say,
33:51okay, what room were you in? In the end, we were only able to find the names for very few, a handful.
33:58And we were able to prove at least a dozen people were killed.
34:07People might be surprised to know that most human rights violations, most civilian deaths,
34:14most of the horror and tragedy that comes through conflict is not with fancy weapons. It is with
34:24old fashioned rifles that have been around for decades. And the way the world is awash in weapons,
34:33it's just more and more possible or feasible that these legacy weapons continue to cause harm.
34:42The U.S. has been cleaning out stockpiles of weapons that I didn't even think were still in
34:48the inventory anymore. Old Hawk, you know, surface air missile systems that the U.S. had decommissioned
34:55long ago, Ukraine is using to shoot down Shahed drones right now. Do you feel like there is a weapon
35:02today or could be in the future that might have a similar level of efficacy in warfare similar to the
35:08IED had in Iraq and Afghanistan? I think the best analogy for the IED and a certain weapon being used
35:18in context, I think the analogy is the FPV drone in Ukraine. And the question is whether FPV drones,
35:26as used currently, is the future of warfare or if it is a context-specific weapon? My personal view is that
35:36it is tailor-made. And that FPV drone, the reason it is so expansively used by both sides is because
35:44there's a long front line, there's a shortage of infantry, there's a shortage of artillery, and there's
35:50an ability to make these weapons locally in a way and quickly and scale that up in a way that it's very
35:58difficult to scale up. Artillery, armor, you know, training more infantry, etc. Some of these things that
36:07are tailor-made, they really do change the nature of war. Machine guns, you know, were a novelty until
36:16World War I and then they completely changed the nature of war. So it's hard to tell if FPV drones
36:22are machine guns that absolutely change how war is conducted or if it's really a one-off.
36:33So investigating U.S. airstrikes in Somalia was my first case, my first investigation at Amnesty.
36:42And so it is quite a way to start to having been a member of the U.S. military and then
36:47investigating the U.S. military. One of the most frustrating things dealing with the U.S. military
36:54is just getting them to admit they did the thing that you proved that they did. We had an initial
37:00report with a number of cases where the U.S. military denied every single one. And then over several years
37:07after that, we documented more and more cases. And it was only one of the last ones at the very end
37:14that the U.S. said, actually, you're right. We did kill that woman in her home with a drone strike
37:21and we shouldn't have done that. Congress has set aside money to essentially provide what the U.S.
37:28calls ex gratia payments. In international law, we would call them reparations or something else.
37:33It's a tangible way for the U.S. military to say, we did this. We shouldn't have. We acknowledge that
37:40your family member was killed. The reason to have reparations is rarely because the payment itself,
37:48obviously, it doesn't replace a child. The payment doesn't fix everything about their life. The
37:52reparations are a sign that a country, a military has acknowledged harm in a way beyond mere words.
38:02You know, it is more than a token. It is more than a press release. And I have found that families
38:09have found closure when you do get all the way through that process. Actually getting the U.S. military
38:20to go through the whole process and actually get the money to these families is excruciating. And in
38:26many cases, we still haven't. I personally find a lot of meaning in being able to say to a family,
38:33we believe you and we can prove it and we're going to. But that's only part of it. Nothing returns a
38:39child, but forcing an organization to say, yes, we really did that, especially when they've been denying it
38:46for how many years ahead of time. It's like the circle isn't complete until there is some tangible,
38:56you know, real transfer that means something, not that it fixes the problem.
39:16So this is the speaker level. So this is the speaker that motion you are talking to.
39:23So just to clarify, it's the speaker that's seen and my title and the version or right of another
39:35coisa that we see in the room for just being close to the table and the answer, which is
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