The Sam Adams Associates are pleased to announce United States Air Force Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell as the recipient of the 2024 Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.
Bushnell was a cyber defense operations specialist with the 531st Intelligence Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. He was assigned to the 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing at Fort Meade in Maryland.
Senior Airman (SRA) Bushnell martyred himself when he walked up to the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, 2024, while streaming himself as he approached, and then self-immolated in protest of what Israel is doing to Palestinians, the most extreme form of protest. He was 25 years old and had been on active duty since May 2020, according to the service.
He had stated as he approached the embassy:
“My name is Aaron Bushnell, and I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest but, compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
In an earlier on-line post, later identified as from SRA Bushnell, he’d written: “I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world and I will never get the blood off my hands.”
In advance of his burning, Bushnell posted this message on his Facebook page:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
As he was consumed by flames, SRA Bushnell’s last words were, “Free Palestine,” said repeatedly.
This was not an act of suicide, as some would have us believe, though SRA Bushnell acted out of despair of any other means of protest having an effect in stopping Israeli genocide and U.S. complicity in that. He obviously suffered the moral injury that so many U.S. service members suffer from when they come to realize their role in, as SRA Bushnell put it: “I have been complicit in the violent domination of the world and I will never get the blood off my hands.”
Hellbound and Down 