Remote command officers denied the killing of a child over chat

Evidence

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach. “Did we just kill a kid?” he asked the man sitting next to him. “Yeah, I guess that was a kid,” the pilot replied. “Was that a kid?” they wrote into a chat window on the monitor. Then, someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world, who had observed their attack. “No. That was a dog,” the person wrote. They reviewed the scene on the video. A dog on two legs? … — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 417

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates the reader’s interest in the principle of impunity and how command obscures accountability for kills.