ICYMI: The drone that almost killed bin Laden

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2016

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Months before 9/11, U.S. Air Force captain Scott Swanson patrolled the skies over Afghanistan with a Predator drone. Swanson and his team were hunting Osama bin Laden. And they found him. But this was months before the new drones could fire missiles, and the pilots could only watch as bin Laden walked away. On Jan 23, 2001 – just three days into George W. Bush’s presidency – a Predator drone test fired a Hellfire missile for the first time. A new age of war had begun. Swanson is the first human to use a Predator-fired Hellfire missile to take a life. From a trailer truck in a garage behind CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Swanson loosed a missile from a drone roughly 7,000 miles away in Kandahar. The missile struck its target – a pickup truck outside a building that intelligence said was hiding Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. The missile hit and killed two of Omar’s bodyguards. This week on War College, we replay our conversation with Swanson. He walks us through the early years of the drone program, how it changed him, and how it changed the world. (Corrects distance from Langley to Kandahar from 2,500 miles to 7,000 miles in fourth paragraph)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast.
0:02.0	Support this show through the A-Cast supporter feature.
0:05.0	It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment.
0:09.0	Just click the link in the show description to support now.
0:19.0	The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. When this tall gentleman in white robes walked out of a building in Tarnack Farms just outside of Kondhar,
0:30.0	it was obvious it was him.
0:33.0	Just months,
0:35.0	just months before the September 11th attacks,
0:40.0	Scott Swanson was piloting an early version of the predator drone over Afghanistan.
0:48.0	Swanson and his team were looking for Osama bin Laden, and that day it looked like they'd found him.
0:54.0	The predator, though, was unarmed.
0:56.3	This week on War College, Swanson takes us through the early history of the predator program,
1:01.9	and he tells us how a skunkworks project ended up being a central part of the U.S.
1:06.4	War Machine.
1:10.5	You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines.
1:17.0	Here are your hosts, Jason Fields, and Matthew Gault. I'm
1:23.0	Gault.
1:25.0	Hello and welcome to War College.
1:30.0	I'm Reuters Opinion Editor Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Gault contributing editor at Wars Boring
1:35.9	Today we're talking with Scott Swanson
1:38.8	He's a retired Air Force pilot and Swanson was an early predator pilot and the first to fire
1:46.4	hellfire missiles in a combat strike. Scott, thanks for joining us.
	...

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