[Common Dreams, Courage Foundation]
“Human rights and press freedom advocates expressed dismay on Tuesday when whistleblower Daniel Hale, who pled guilty earlier this year to violating the Espionage Act, was sentenced to 45 months in prison for sharing with a journalist classified information about the U.S. military’s drone assassination program.”
“”Whistleblower Daniel Hale has just been sentenced to 45 months in prison for exposing U.S. war crimes,” said anti-war group CodePink. “While his sentencing isn’t the 10 years we feared, it is 45 months too long.””
“Hale’s lawyers argued in court papers that his humanitarian motives, and the lack of harm resulting from his actions, warranted a lenient sentence.”
“Prosecutors, however, claimed Hale’s leaks posed a greater risk to “national security” than those of Reality Winner, the former National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower released last month after serving four years of a 63-month sentence—the longest ever imposed for disclosing classified government information to the media. They sought a sentence “significantly longer” than Winner’s.”
“U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady said the 45-month prison sentence he gave Hale was necessary to “deter others from disclosing government secrets,” the Associated Press reported.”
“Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who has lived in Russia with asylum protections since leaking classified materials on U.S. government mass surveillance in 2013, was among those who denounced the judge’s decision.”
“In May 2019, Hale was charged under the Espionage Act for leaking secret documents to a reporter widely believed to be The Intercept‘s Jeremy Scahill.”
“”These documents detailed a secret, unaccountable process for targeting and killing people around the world, including U.S. citizens, through drone strikes,” Betsy Reed, editor-in-chief of The Intercept, said after Hale’s indictment. “They are of vital public importance, and activity related to their disclosure is protected by the First Amendment.””
“According to journalist Kevin Gosztola, Hale’s whistleblowing enabled The Intercept to reveal that “nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group,” detail how assassination targets ended up on Obama’s “kill list,” and expose new information about Bilal el-Berjawi, a Briton “who was stripped of his citizenship before being killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012.””
“Hale, 33, of Nashville, Tennessee, was an Air Force intelligence analyst between 2009 and 2013. In 2012, he deployed to Afghanistan to support the U.S. Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Task Force and was responsible for identifying, tracking, and targeting “high-value” terror suspects.”
“In a handwritten letter released last week, Hale explained that his decision to disclose top-secret information about the inner workings of U.S. drone warfare was motivated by guilt over his role in carrying out “gruesome” killings of defenseless people “from the cold comfort of a computer chair.””
“CodePink is spearheading a petition asking President Joe Biden—Obama’s vice president—to pardon Hale.”
“The Obama and Trump administrations both went to great lengths to prevent leaks and punish government officials for divulging information to reporters. Before former President Donald Trump launched a “war on whistleblowers,” the Department of Justice under Obama prosecuted nine leak cases, more than all previous administrations combined.”
“Last month, the Washington Post‘s publisher accused Biden’s Justice Department of exacerbating the Trump-era assault on press freedom, prompting the DOJ last week to prohibit prosecutors from using secret orders and subpoenas to obtain journalists’ phone and email records.”
“Nevertheless, Biden’s DOJ continued to prosecute Hale and is also still pursuing an espionage case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that began under Trump.”
“The Espionage Act, a World War I-era law that criminalizes the disclosure of classified government information to unauthorized viewers, has been used on several occasions to punish whistleblowers, including Hale, Assange, Snowden, Winner, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, and others.”
“A group of First Amendment and media law scholars wrote the court in support of Hale, calling him ‘a classic whistleblower, who acted in good faith to alert the public of secret government policies that deserved to be debated by the citizens in a truly functioning democracy,'” the Post reported. “They argue that the Espionage Act was intended to punish foreign spies, not those who seek to enlighten the American people.”
“The ACLU echoed that message on Tuesday, stating that “leaks to [the] press in the public interest shouldn’t be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.””
“Before he was sentenced, Hale read a powerful and intensely emotional speech to the court, condemning the horrors of war, particularly the post-9/11 U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and drew attention to Iraqi and Afghan victims of the U.S. drone assassination program. He said he opposes war for the same reasons he opposes the death penalty, saying it’s wrong to kill and especially wrong to kill the defenseless. The U.S. often posthumously labels those it kills as “combatants,” and Hale said that sometimes up to 90% of victims in a given airstrike are unidentifiable.”
“Hale said that he is a descendant of Nathan Hale, who spied on British troops for the United States in the Revolutionary War, and who was executed following his own espionage conviction more than two hundred years ago. Daniel Hale echoed the famous sentiment of his ancestor in his speech: “My only regret is that I have but one life to give to my country, whether here or in prison.””
“Hale talked about the “moral injury” war inflicts on soldiers. He said a fellow member of the Air Force once said to him about drone strikes, “You ever step on an ant? That’s what we’re doing.” He talked about how this weighed on him, how it “tore [him] up inside” to the point of “nearly giving up.” Hale said,”
“I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life. For that I was compensated and given a medal. I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretended that things weren’t happening that were. Please, your honor, forgive me for taking papers instead of taking human lives.”
Read more: Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale Sentenced to 45 Months in Prison ‘For Exposing US War Crimes’ and Daniel Hale sentenced to 45 months in prison
Related: Drone Whistleblower Gets 45 Months in Prison for Revealing Ongoing US War Crimes
2021-week30
