Category: Daniel Hale

Update: On March 5 we learned that Daniel Hale has been released from prison! Thank you to all those who have written Daniel and supported his release.

Daniel Hale is serving out his 45-month sentence for revealing the clandestine drone assassination program of the Obama administration, how it chose and killed its targets based on poor evidence, and that 9 out of 10 drone casualties were innocent bystanders. He is held at Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio in a Communications Management Unit. His release date is 5 July 2024.

We strongly encourage people to write to Daniel; he both deserves and needs our solidarity and support. You can send up to 6 pages, double-sided, only on plain white paper (no cards), with blue or black ink, handwritten or printed. Use standard-size envelopes, no packages.

Daniel Everette Hale
26069-075 USP Marion
P.O. Box 1000
Marion, Illinois
62959

Further advice from the Stand With Daniel support team:

“Be sure to use your full legal name and a physical address as the return address, not a P.O. Box. Also be aware that Daniel can’t respond to group or organizational letters, only to individual persons. Daniel can receive photos (in color) in the mail, fun memes, transcripts (such as of interesting podcasts) and printouts of news articles. He is hoping for articles you found compelling, work out routines to help pass the time, and words of affirmation! Hand drawings are allowed, and we encourage them.”

Courage Trustee Daniel Elsberg greatly admired Daniel Hale, and the two spoke weekly until Elsberg became very ill. Elsberg referred to him in some of his final interviews and wishes:

“But the final thing I would say is there are lots of things having to do with preserving the Constitution, as in Snowden’s case, or shortening a war, or in stopping a massive assassination program, the drone program, as in Daniel Hale’s case, that do make it indeed quite worthwhile to sacrifice yourself in order to save the lives of lot of people,” Ellsberg says. “I would like to encourage people to ask themselves the question: ‘Am I willing to sacrifice my career, my life, to save these other lives?’ And most people will say no. That’s humanity. That’s the way it is. But definitely, if they ask that question as I was led to ask myself the question, you can very well look at it that way and you can say yes.”

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Learn more about Daniel Hale:

• Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence
• Blueprint for Free Speech International Whistleblowing Prize
• A remarkable portrait of Daniel Hale was done by Robert Shetterly as part of his Americans Who Tell The Truth series of portraits.

Whistleblower Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison today, for disclosing government documents on the U.S. military’s drone program to a journalist. The sentence—three years and nine months—includes his time served during court proceedings and will be followed by three years of supervised release. 

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 recounted the day he plead guilty to one count under the Espionage Act. He biked to the Capitol that day, to the Department of Justice, and to the war memorials on the National Monument. He noticed there was no monument to mark the end of the Iraq War, and he said the most powerful memorial is for the Vietnam War, consisting of a long black marble slab engraved with the names of dead American soldiers. “If the memorial included the names of the Vietnamese dead,” he said, “it would be four miles long.” 

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.”

Judge Liam O’Grady took note of Hale’s widespread support, mentioning that several dozen people, including former members of the military, journalists, and others have written letters to the judge calling for leniency and considering Hale a hero. Judge O’Grady himself said that Hale deserves credit for the time he spent after his Air Force service in informing the public about U.S. warfare, but said that he could’ve done so without disclosing documents to the reporter. O’Grady noted this case raises the issue of the intersection of the First Amendment with national security interests, and said that he needed to deliver a substantial sentence to act as a deterrent against those whom Hale might inspire.

O’Grady sentenced Hale to 45 months in prison, to be served in northern Virginia. 

Following the proceedings, a press conference was held outside the courtroom. CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou applauded Hale for acting on his morals, and said there could be “no sentence that will deter someone who knows in their soul that a crime is being committed. There will always be people with a conscience.”

Chip Gibbons, with Defending Rights and Dissent, condemned the double standard applied to media leaks: “If Daniel Hale had leaked documents that supported” U.S. military action “rather than exposed it, he wouldn’t be in prison today.”

Jesselyn Radack, herself a former whistleblower and a member of Hale’s legal team, said “Daniel rejects the notion that he is a hero or a victim.” What he wants the public to know and talk about, she said, are the victims of the wars he tried to expose. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, who has been through an Espionage Act prosecution, lauded Hale’s personal sacrifice, knowing what he could face but doing the right thing anyway.

As the official remarks concluded, the crowd chanted a call for President Biden to pardon Daniel Hale. 

Former Air Force and NSA intelligence analyst Daniel Hale, who blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s drone strike program in 2013, plead guilty to one count under the Espionage Act yesterday. Hale faced five charges, each carrying a decade in prison, in the Eastern District of Virginia, where a conviction would have been all but guaranteed. Hale, who now faces up to 10 years in prison, is scheduled to be sentenced this summer.

Hale disclosed documents shedding new light on the U.S.’s secret remote assassination program, including how the Obama administration decided who to place on its “kill lists,” internal criticisms of the program, and accounts of civilian casualties.

In 2015, The Intercept published “The Drone Papers” based on a “cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.”

The following year, The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill published “The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program.” As the Washington Post reports, “A chapter in the book, “Why I Leaked the Watchlist Documents,” was written by “Anonymous.” Hale admitted in court Wednesday to writing the chapter anonymously.”

Throughout his trial, Hale’s legal team, which includes veteran whistleblower attorney Jesselyn Radack, contested the use of the 1917 Espionage Act, which was created in World War I to target traitors and spies but became the Obama administration’s weapon of choice against whistleblowers from Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou to Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

“Daniel Hale may have pleaded to a count under the Espionage Act, but he is not a spy,” Radack wrote upon news of his plea.

“He was accused of giving an investigative journalist truthful information in the public interest about the secretive US drone warfare program. That information revealed gross human rights violations, and that drones were more deadly and less accurate than the US presented publicly.
…
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.”

Hale’s plea, though not part of a deal with prosecutors, is an attempt to avoid potentially decades in prison. A conviction in the EDVA, where a jury would comprise members of the military industrial complex and their relatives, would have been all but guaranteed. CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou has said of the Alexandria court’s high percentage of Espionage Act convictions, “They don’t call EDVA the “Espionage Court” for nothing.”

Furthermore, the government would likely have given Hale an exorbitantly high prison sentence in an effort to make an example of a whistleblower and to chill the vital investigative journalism based on classified source documents which inform the public about what their governments do in their name.

“Classified information is published in the press every day,” Radack explained.

“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.

Every whistleblower jailed under the Espionage Act is a threat to the work of national security journalists and the sources they rely upon to hold the government accountable.”

Hale’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for July 13th. We’ll continue to report on his case.