DANIEL HALE, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst, was sentenced to 45 months in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to leaking a trove of government documents exposing the inner workings and severe civilian costs of the U.S. militarys drone program. Appearing in an Alexandria, Virginia, courtroom, the 33-year-old Hale told U.S. District Judge Liam OGrady that he believed it was necessary to dispel the lie that drone warfare keeps us safe, that our lives are worth more than theirs.
I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take precious human life, Hale said. I couldnt keep living in a world in which people pretend that things werent happening that were. Please, your honor, forgive me for taking papers instead of human lives.
In delivering his judgement, OGrady said that Hale was not being prosecuted for speaking out about the drone program killing innocent people and that he could have been a whistleblower without taking any of these documents.
Though the nearly four-year sentence fell short of the maximum sentence of 11 years behind bars sought by federal prosecutors, the conviction marked another victory for the U.S. government in an ongoing crackdown on national security leaks that has spanned multiple presidential administrations.
Hale was indicted by a grand jury and arrested in 2019 on a series of counts related to the unauthorized disclosure of national defense and intelligence information and the theft of government property. In addition to documents related to how the government chooses its drone strike targets and information detailing how often people who are not the intended targets of those strikes are nonetheless killed Hale was also linked to the release of a secret, though unclassified, rulebook detailing how the U.S. government places individuals in its sprawling system of watchlists. Long shrouded in secrecy, the release of the rulebook has been celebrated by advocacy groups as a triumph of the post-9/11 era.
Since his indictment more than two years ago, government filings have strongly implied that The Intercept was the recipient of Hales disclosures. In a statement on Tuesday, Intercept Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed said, Daniel Hale will spend years in prison for leaking documents that the government implied were published by The Intercept. These documents revealed the truth about the U.S. governments secretive, murderous drone war, including that the killing of civilians was far more widespread than previously acknowledged. The Intercept will not comment on our sources. But whoever brought the documents in question to light undoubtedly served a noble public purpose.
She added: Hale was also charged with disclosing a secret rule book detailing the parallel judicial system for watchlisting people and categorizing them as known or suspected terrorists without needing to prove they did anything wrong. Under these rules, people, including U.S. citizens, can be barred from flying or detained in airports and at borders while being denied the ability to challenge government declarations about them. The disclosure of the watchlisting rule book led to dozens of legal actions and important court victories for the protection of civil liberties.
As has become standard practice in the U.S., Hale was charged under the Espionage Act, and he pleaded guilty to one count in March. Under the highly controversial 1917 law, defendants cannot point to their efforts to inform the public about government actions and operations as a defense for leaking classified information. President Barack Obama weaponized the anti-spying law as a tool to hammer government employees who were sources for national security stories, particularly those that were unflattering for the government. The Trump administration continued the practice and now, so too, has the Biden administration.
In todays sentencing, the court did reject the prosecutions extreme demands, but Hales prison sentence is nonetheless another tragic example of how the government misuses the Espionage Act to punish alleged journalistic sources as spies, a practice that damages human rights, press freedom, and democracy, Reed added in her statement.
Hales support team, in a statement following the sentencing, said: everyone agrees #DanielHale is not a spy. He is a deeply honorable man who is being punished simply for acting on his conscience and telling the truth.
AHEAD OF HIS sentencing this week, Hale filed an 11-page handwritten letter to the court detailing the motivations behind his actions. In vivid detail, Hale recalled his own experience locating targets for American drone strikes. By some estimates, U.S. drone operations abroad, conducted by both the military and the CIA, have killed between 9,000 and 17,000 people since 2004, including as many as 2,200 children and multiple U.S. citizens. Those estimates, however, undercount the true cost of remote American warfare as Hale noted in his letter to the court last week, the U.S. military has a practice of labeling all individuals killed in such operations as enemies killed in action unless proven otherwise.
With drone warfare, sometimes nine out of 10 people killed are innocent, Hale said on Tuesday. You have to kill part of your conscience to do your job.
In their sentencing filing, Hales defense lawyers said that he had felt extraordinary guilt for having been complicit in what he viewed as unjustifiable killings through his involvement in the drone program and argued that his disclosures were compelled by a sense of moral duty. In motions filed in the past week, government prosecutors sought to rebut this picture, painting Hale as a self-interested egomaniac who risked his freedom to ingratiate himself with the journalists he admired and compared his justifications to those of a heroin dealer.
In arguing that Hale should receive a maximum sentence of more than a decade in prison, the government repeatedly referred to secret evidence unavailable for public review purporting to show that the Islamic State had circulated Hales disclosures online, thus putting American lives at risk. Harry P. Cooper, a former senior official in the CIA and noted agency expert on classified materials who reviewed the documents and provided a declaration in Hales case, offered a starkly different interpretation.
The disclosure of these documents, at the time they were disclosed and made public, did not present any substantial risk of harm to the United States or to national security, Cooper said in a sworn declaration. In short, an adversary who has gained a tactical advantage by receiving secret information would never publicize their possession of it.