On 4/9/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Drone King Obama Enjoys Life in $11 Million Mansion, While DroneAnd they say the System is broke. The rules, established by and for
Whistleblower Daniel Hale Goes to Jail for Exposing War Crimes
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - April 9, 2021 0
Daniel Hale at peace demonstration against drone warfare. [Source:
diy.rootsaction.org]
Hale's case reflects the twisted morality and corruption of the legal
system
in an imperialist nation.
In our upside-down world, good guys often go to jail, and bad guys get
promoted and live luxuriously.
Ex-President Barack Obama, a key architect of modern drone warfare, today
lives in an $11.75 million, 6,892 square-foot waterfront mansion on a
30-acre property on Martha's Vineyard, and is regarded by many people as a
great moral leader.
The Obama mansion. [Source: mansionglobal.com]
Donald Trump, who expanded the drone war even further than Obama, is also
enjoying life these days at his $160 million Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm
Beach, Florida.
Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate [Source: townandcountrymag.com]
Daniel Hale, by contrast, a principled former Air Force officer and defense
contractor who publicly exposed the drone program, will likely be spending
at least the next two years in federal prison.
Daniel Hale in a police photo taken at the time of his arrest in 2019.
[Source: knowdrones.com]
On March 31st, Hale pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia to
one count of illegally retaining and transmitting classified national
defense information in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917.
The documents pertaining to the U.S. drone war were transmitted to The
Intercept reporter Jeremy Scahill in 2014/5 and published as part of a
series called "The Drone Papers."
Document leaked by Hale and published by The Intercept contains a hit-list
scorecard. [Source: theintercept.com]
Hale is scheduled to be sentenced on July 7th. He is expected to receive
between two and five years in prison, which is what other whistleblowers
have received after pleading guilty to similar charges.
Under the terms of the plea deal, four other counts against him were not
dropped but placed in abeyance, giving the government the theoretical
option
to bring them to trial in the future.
Whistleblower Jesselyn Radack is Hale's lawyer. [Source: gstatic.com]
Hale's lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, stated in an exclusive interview with
CovertAction Magazine (CAM) that Hale accepted the plea deal because he
"would not have received a fair trial because the arcane Espionage Act does
not allow for a public interest defense. Meaning, Hale's motive of wanting
to inform the public could not be raised as a defense to the charge of
disclosure of information."
According to Radack, "the U.S. government's policy of punishing people who
provide journalists with information in the public interest is a profound
threat to free speech, free press, and a healthy democracy."
"Classified information is published in the press every day; in fact, the
biggest leaker of classified information is the U.S. government. However,
the Espionage Act is used uniquely to punish those sources who give
journalists information that embarrasses the government or exposes its
lies."
"Those Who Speak for Reasons of Conscience Get Punished"
Before Hale, Radack represented national security whistleblowers Edward
Snowden, John Kiriakou, and Thomas Drake. She is the founder of the
Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts, which
she helped establish to protect investigative journalism and provide pro
bono direct legal representation to whistleblowers.
Radack became a whistleblower herself in 2001 while working at the
Department of Justice (DOJ), which suppressed emails she had sent to a DOJ
counterterrorism prosecutor stating that the FBI's initial interrogation of
John Walker Lindh, a U.S. citizen who fought for the Taliban, was illegal
because it was not conducted with a lawyer present and the information
gained could not be used for criminal prosecution.[1]
The DOJ subsequently dismissed Radack and tried to have her disbarred, and
she was blacklisted for a period from the legal profession in
Washington.[2]
One of the lessons that she says she learned from her experience was that
"those who speak out for reasons of conscience get punished."[3]
This is certainly the case for Hale, whom Radack said "was accused of
giving
an investigative journalist truthful information in the public interest
about the secretive U.S. drone warfare program. That information revealed
gross human rights violations, and that drones were more deadly and less
accurate than the U.S. presented publicly."
[Source: codepink.org]
John Ivy, Hale's Air Force roommate, described Hale as "a kind and caring
person who promised his life in defense of this nation and its values. The
people conducting secret illegal killings in other countries are criminals.
Standing up for human rights makes Daniel a hero."
Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights and Dissent, who has
aided
in Hale's legal defense, further noted that "it is a disgrace to this
country that time and time again, when brave truth-tellers, many of them
relatively young, expose the crimes of our government, it is they who go to
jail."
A Man Trying to Right a Wrong
Hale, now 33 years old, was born in Nashville, Tennessee. He participated
in
the drone program from 2009 to 2013 as an Air Force officer.
During that time, he deployed to Afghanistan as an intelligence analyst
with
the National Security Agency (NSA) and Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC), where he worked at the Bagram Air Force Base helping to identify
targets for drone strikes.
On his resume, Hale claimed he had "operated payloads on remotely piloted
vehicles (RPVs) used to support kill/capture-and had logged over 1,540
hours
on over 200 special missions."
Drone operators. [Source: gq.com]
From December 2013 to August 2014, while employed by the defense contractor
Leidos, Hale worked as a political geography analyst with the
National-Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Fort Belvoir, Virginia,
where he maintained a top-secret security clearance.
The $1.8 billion headquarters for the NGA headquarters in Fort Belvoir,
Virginia, where Hale worked. [Source: electrospace.net]
In April 2013, while he was still working for the NSA, Hale met with Jeremy
Scahill at Busboys and Poets bookstore in Washington, D.C., following a
signing for Scahill's book, Dirty Wars (2013). Hale subsequently messaged a
friend saying that Scahill wanted him to talk about his experiences in the
drone war.
Jeremy Scahill [Source: washingtonexaminer.com]
The two began communicating via an encrypted messaging service, Jabbar, and
Hale provided Scahill at least 17 documents he had printed from an NGA
computer in 2014.
At least 11 of these were classified as top secret or secret and marked as
such.
They included PowerPoint presentations on counter-terrorism operations and
documents describing military campaigns targeting Al-Qaeda including in
Northern Africa (Somalia) and the Arabian Sea. Others which pointed to the
existence of hit-lists and "baseball cards" of terrorists and a watchlist
of
1.2 million people who were targets for drone surveillance.
Some of the documents leaked to The Intercept. [Source: the intercept.com]
Hale's whistleblowing led to the revelation furthermore that nearly half of
the people on the U.S. government's widely shared database of terrorist
suspects were not connected to any known terrorist group.
In Scahill's Intercept series, Hale is referred to as "the source," and
quoted as stating that he provided the documents to The Intercept because
"he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which
people are placed on kill-lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from
the highest echelon of the U.S. government."
Watchlist leaked by Hale. [Source: theintercept.com]
Hale was further quoted in the article, entitled "The Assassination
Complex," stating that "this outrageous explosion of watch-listing-of
monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them
numbers, assigning them 'baseball cards,' assigning them death sentences
without notice on a worldwide battlefield-it was from the very first
instance, wrong."
Leaked document which makes reference to development of "baseball cards" of
drone targets. [Source: theintercept.com]
Speaking Out
Hale first spoke out publicly against the drone war at a November 2013
Drone
Summit in Washington, D.C., organized by the peace group CodePink, where he
apologized for his involvement in the program, and again at a January 2014
rally outside the White House where he called for the closure of the prison
camp at Guantanamo Bay.
In 2016, he was featured in the award-winning documentary, National Bird,
produced by Sonia Kennebeck and famed director Errol Morris, which
spotlighted dissenting drone pilots.
Award-winning documentary entitled National Bird featuring, among others,
Daniel Hale.
Hale stated in the film that, while the government claims that drones
protect American lives, in fact they embolden military commanders and make
going to war too easy.
The military assumed that anyone killed in a drone strike had to have been
associated with the target, when many were innocent bystanders.
Leaked document showing that 34.1% of fatalities from TF 3-10 mission were
associates of targeted individuals. None was ever charged with, let alone
convicted, of any crime. [Source: theintercept.com]
What ate away at Hale was the uncertainty of whom he had killed when he was
planning the strikes-which could never be known.
Continuing War on Whistleblowers and Its Double Standards
In August 2014, Hale's home was raided by the FBI, three days after he had
printed out his last document at the NGA, and two weeks after The Intercept
had published the first article based on his material.
The Intercept, it should be noted, has a particularly poor track record in
protecting its sources: Reality Winner, who leaked classified documents to
The Intercept on Russia-Gate, for example, is currently serving a five-year
prison sentence-the longest-ever sentence for disclosure of information.
Reality Winner [Source: nytimes.com]
At Hale's home, FBI agents found a USB flash drive with the TOR software
and
the TAILS operating system, both used for anonymous internet
communications.
Also found on a thumb drive was the unclassified (and unpublished document)
T on his computer and one page of document A, which was classified secret
and published in October 2015.
Hale's case lay dormant until his arrest in May 2019 as part of the Trump
administration's accelerated and aggressive crackdown on leaks and
whistleblowers.
In her interview with CAM, Jesselyn Radack affirmed that Hale's prosecution
signified a continuation of this war on whistleblowers and leakers under
the
new Biden administration.
Radack stated that, "while it's unlikely that the Biden administration
would
[have] step[ped] in to stop an ongoing case, by continuing Hale's case and
continuing to seek extradition of Julian Assange [WikiLeaks founder who is
also being prosecuted under the Espionage Act], it's clear that the Biden
administration does not plan to stop the war on whistleblowers."
Biden's personal support for these measures is not surprising, considering
his call as a Senator in the late 1970s to lock up CIA whistleblower Philip
Agee.
According to Radack, the double standards of today's war on whistleblowers
was epitomized by the leniency granted to General David Petraeus, the
former
CIA Director.
He got off with a mere $40,000 fine and two years' probation, after
pleading
guilty in 2015 to a charge of mishandling classified documents about the
war
in Afghanistan, which he had leaked to his mistress, Paula Broadwell.
David Petraeus and his mistress Paula Broadwell, to whom he leaked
classified documents. [Source: ibtimes.co.uk]
While his case was pending, Petraeus spent his time teaching at Harvard,
making lucrative speeches across the globe, pulling in a massive salary as
a
partner in one of the world's biggest private-equity firms, KKR, and
reportedly even advising the White House.
Petraeus's offense was actually quite serious-he lent "Black Books" to
Broadwell that, according to a U.S. attorney, "contained classified
information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy,
intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes
and
deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council
meetings,
and discussions with the President.
In addition, they contained "national defense information, including Top
Secret/SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] and code word
information." According to the court documents, Petraeus also admitted to
making false statements to the FBI, another felony.
The crucial difference between Petraeus and Hale was not in rank and status
but the fact that Petraeus has continued to toe the official line on U.S.
foreign policy, whereas Hale has not.
For that, he will have to pay a steep price-just like Chelsea Manning,
Edward Snowden and, a generation ago, Philip Agee.
