aniel
Hale, dressed
in a khaki uniform, his hair cut short and
sporting a long, neatlygroomed brown beard,
is seated behind a plexiglass screen,
speaking into a telephone receiver at the
federal prison in Marion, Illinois.
I hold a
receiver on the other side of the plexiglass
and listen as he describes his journey from
working for the National Security Agency and
the Joint Special Operations Task Force at
Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to becoming
federal prisoner 26069-07.
Hale, a
34-year-old former Air Force signals
intelligence analyst, is
serving a
45-month prison sentence, following his
conviction under the Espionage Act for disclosing
classified documents about
the U.S. military’s drone assassination
program and its high civilian death toll.
The documents
are believed to be the source material for “The
Drone Papers”
published by The Intercept, on
Oct. 15, 2015.
These documents
revealed that between January 2012 and
February 2013, U.S. special operations drone
airstrikes killed more than 200 people — of
which only 35 were the intended targets.
According to the documents, over one
five-month period of the operation, nearly
90 percent of the people killed in
airstrikes were not the intended targets.
The civilian dead, usually innocent
bystanders, were routinely classified as
“enemies killed in action.”
[You can see my
interview with Hale’s attorney, Jesselyn
Radack, here.]
The terrorizing
and widespread killing of
thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of
civilians was a potent recruiting tool for
the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents. The aerial
attacks created far more hostile fighters
than they eliminated and enraged many in the
Muslim world.
Hale is
composed, articulate and physically fit from
his self-imposed regime of daily exercise.
We discuss books he has recently read,
including John Steinbeck’s novel East of
Eden and Nicholson Baker’s Baseless:
My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the
Freedom of Information Act, which
explores whether the U.S. used biological
weapons on China and Korea during World War
II and the Korean War.
Hale is
currently housed
in the
Communications Management Unit (CMU), a
special unit that severely restricts and
heavily monitors communications, including
our conversation, and visitations.
The decision by
the Bureau of Prisons to lock Hale up in the
most restrictive wing of a supermax prison
ignores the recommendation of the sentencing
Judge Liam O’Grady, who suggested that
he be placed in a low-security prison
hospital facility in Butner, North Carolina,
where he could get treatment for his PTSD.
Hale is one of
a few dozen people of conscience who have
sacrificed their careers and their freedom
to inform the public about government
crimes, fraud and lies. Rather than
investigate the crimes that are exposed and
hold those who carried them out to account,
the two ruling parties wage war on all who
speak out.
These men and
women of conscience are the lifeblood of
journalism. Reporters cannot document abuses
of power without them. The silence on the
part of the press over Hale’s imprisonment,
as well as the persecution and imprisonment
of other champions of an open society, such
as Julian
Assange, is
stunningly shortsighted.
If our most
important public servants, those with the
courage to inform the public, continue to be
criminalized at this rate, we will cement in
place total censorship, resulting in a world
where the abuses and crimes of the powerful
are shrouded in darkness.
President
Barack Obama weaponized the Espionage
Act to
prosecute those who provided classified
information to the press. The Obama White
House, whose assault on civil liberties was
worse than those of the Bush
administration, used
the 1917
Act, designed to prosecute spies, against
eight people who leaked information to the
media including —
Edward Snowden, Thomas
Drake, Chelsea
Manning, Jeffrey
Sterling and John
Kiriakou,
who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for
exposing the routine torture of suspects
held in black sites.
Also under The
Espionage Act, Joshua
Schulte,
a former CIA software engineer, was
convicted on
July 13, 2022, of the so-called Vault
7 leak,
published by WikiLeaks in 2017,
which revealed how
the C.I.A. hacked Apple and Android
smartphones and turned internet-connected
televisions into listening devices. He faces
up to 80 years in prison. Assange — although
he is a publisher and not a U.S. citizen,
and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based
publication, was indicted by the Trump
administration under the Act
Obama used
the Espionage
Act against those who provided information
to the media more than all previous
administrations combined. He set a
terrifying legal precedent, equating
informing the public with spying for a
hostile power.
I published classified
material when
I was a reporter at The New York Times.
Prosecution for mere possession of
such material, along with its publication is
a short step from criminalizing journalism
to the imprisonment and murder of reporters,
such as Jamal
Khashoggi in
the Saudi consulate in 2018 in Istanbul.
While Assange
was sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy in
London, the C.I.A. discussed kidnapping and assassinating
him following
the release of the Vault 7 documents.
The Espionage
Act has been abused in the past. President
Woodrow Wilson used it to throw socialists,
including Eugene
V. Debs,
in prison for opposing America’s
participation in World War I. But not until
the Trump administration was it turned on
the press.
Wholesale
government surveillance, about which many
charged under the Espionage Act tried to
warn the public, includes surveillance
of journalists. The
surveillance of the press, along with those
who attempt to inform the public by
providing information to reporters, has
largely shut down investigations into the
machinery of power. The price of telling the
truth is too costly.
Hale, trained
in the army as a Mandarin linguist, was
uneasy the moment he began working in the
secretive drone program.
“I needed a
paycheck,” he says of his work in the Air
Force and later as a private contractor in
the drone program, “I was homeless. I had
nowhere else to go. But I knew it was
wrong.”
While stationed
at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he took a
week off in October 2011 to camp out in New
York’s Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall
Street movement. He wore his uniform — a
gutsy act of open defiance for someone on
active duty — and held up a sign that read,
“Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet
announced her transition.
“I slept in the
park,” he says. “I was there the morning
[Mayor] Bloomberg and his girlfriend made
the first attempt to clear the occupiers. I
stood with thousands of protestors,
including Teamsters and communications
workers, who ringed the park. The police
backed down. I learned later that while I
was in the park, Obama ordered a drone
strike in Yemen that
killed Abdulrahman
Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the
radicalized cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, killed
by a drone strike two weeks earlier.”
Hale was
deployed a few months later to Afghanistan’s
Bagram Air Force Base.
He described
his work in a
letter to
the judge:
“In my
capacity as a signals intelligence
analyst stationed at Bagram Airbase, I
was made to track down the geographic
location of handset cell phone devices
believed to be in the possession of
so-called enemy combatants. To
accomplish this mission required access
to a complex chain of globe-spanning
satellites capable of maintaining an
unbroken connection with remotely
piloted aircraft, commonly referred to
as drones. Once a steady connection is
made and a targeted cell phone device is
acquired, an imagery analyst in the
U.S., in coordination with a drone pilot
and camera operator, would take over
using information I provided to surveil
everything that occurred within the
drone’s field of vision. This was done,
most often, to document the day-to-day
lives of suspected militants. Sometimes,
under the right conditions, an attempt
at capture would be made. Other times, a
decision to strike and kill them where
they stood would be weighed.
The first
time that I witnessed a drone strike
came within days of my arrival to
Afghanistan. Early that morning, before
dawn, a group of men had gathered
together in the mountain ranges of
Patika province around a campfire
carrying weapons and brewing tea. That
they carried weapons with them would not
have been considered out of the ordinary
in the place I grew up, much less within
the virtually lawless tribal territories
outside the control of the Afghan
authorities. Except that among them was
a suspected member of the Taliban, given
away by the targeted cell phone device
in his pocket. As for the remaining
individuals, to be armed, of military
age, and sitting in the presence of an
alleged enemy combatant was enough
evidence to place them under suspicion
as well. Despite having peacefully
assembled, posing no threat, the fate of
the now tea drinking men had all but
been fulfilled. I could only look on as
I sat by and watched through a computer
monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry
of hellfire missiles came crashing down,
splattering purple-colored crystal guts
on the side of the morning mountain.
Since that
time and to this day, I continue to
recall several such scenes of graphic
violence carried out from the cold
comfort of a computer chair. Not a day
goes by that I don’t question the
justification for my actions. By the
rules of engagement, it may have been
permissible for me to have helped to
kill those men — whose language I did
not speak, whose customs I did not
understand, and whose crimes I could not
identify — in the gruesome manner that I
did. Watch them die. But how could it be
considered honorable of me to
continuously have laid in wait for the
next opportunity to kill unsuspecting
persons, who, more often than not, are
posing no danger to me or any other
person at the time. Nevermind honorable,
how could it be that any thinking person
continued to believe that it was
necessary for the protection of the
United States of America to be in
Afghanistan and killing people, not one
of whom present was responsible for the
September 11th attacks on our nation.
Notwithstanding, in 2012, a full year
after the demise of Osama bin Laden in
Pakistan, I was a part of killing
misguided young men who were but mere
children on the day of 9/11.”
Hale drifted
after leaving the Air Force, dropped out of
the New School where he had been attending
college and then got a job with a private
contractor working at the government’s
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He
worked there as a political geography
analyst between December 2013 and August
2014.
“I was making $
80,000 a year,” he says into the receiver.
“I had friends with college degrees who
could not make that kind of money.”
Inspired by
peace activist David Dellinger, Hale decided
to become a “traitor” to “the American way
of death.” He would make amends for his
complicity in the killings, even at the cost
of his freedom. He leaked 17 classified
documents that exposed the high number of
civilian deaths from drone strikes. He
became an outspoken and prominent critic of
the drone program.
Because Hale
was charged under the Espionage
Act,
he was not permitted to explain his
motivations to the court. He was also
forbidden from providing evidence to the
court that the drone assassination program
killed and wounded large numbers of
noncombatants, including children.
“Evidence of
the defendant’s views of military and
intelligence procedures would needlessly
distract the jury from the question of
whether he had illegally retained and
transmitted classified documents, and
instead convert the trail into an inquest of
U.S. military and intelligence procedures,”
government attorneys said in a motion at Hale’s
trial.
“The defendant
may wish for his criminal trial to become a
forum on something other than his guilt, but
those debates cannot and do not inform the
core questions in this case: whether the
defendant illegally retained and transferred
the documents he stole,” the government
motion continued.
Drones often
fire Hellfire missiles equipped with an
explosive warhead weighing about 20 pounds.
A Hellfire variant, known as the R9X,
carries an inert warhead. Instead of
exploding, it hurls about 100 pounds of
metal through a vehicle. The missile’s other
feature includes six long blades tucked
inside which deploy seconds before impact,
shredding anything in front of it —
including people.
Drones hover 24
hours a day in the skies over countries including Iraq,
Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria and,
before the U.S. defeat, Afghanistan. Operated
remotely from
Air Force bases as far away from the target
sites as Nevada, drones fire ordinance that
instantly and without warning obliterates
homes and vehicles or kills clusters of
people. Hale found the jocularity of the
young drone operators, who treated the
killings as if they were an enhanced video
game, disturbing. Child victims of drone
attacks were dismissed as “fun-sized
terrorists.”
Those who
survive drone strikes are often badly
maimed,
losing limbs, suffering severe burns and
shrapnel wounds, and losing their vision and
hearing.
In a
statement he read at
his sentencing on July 27, 2021, Hale said:
“I think of
the farmers in their poppy fields whose
daily harvest will gain them safe
passage from the warlords, who will, in
turn, trade it for weapons before it is
synthesized, repackaged, and re-sold
dozens of times before it finds its way
into this country and into the broken
veins of our nation’s next opioid
victim. I think of the women who,
despite living their entire lives never
once allowed to make so much as a choice
for themselves, are treated as pawns in
a ruthless game politicians play when
they need a justification to further the
killing of their sons & husbands. And I
think of the children, whose
bright-eyed, dirty faces look to the sky
and hope to see clouds of gray, afraid
of the clear blue days that beckon
drones to come carrying eager death
notes for their fathers.”
“As one drone
operator put it,” he read in court,
“‘Do you
ever step on ants and never give it
another thought?’ That’s what you’re
made to think of the targets. They
deserved it, they chose their side. You
had to kill a part of your conscience to
keep doing your job — ignoring the voice
inside telling you this wasn’t right. I,
too, ignored the voice inside as I
continued walking blindly towards the
edge of an abyss. And when I found
myself at the brink, ready to give in,
the voice said to me, ‘You, who had been
a hunter of men, are no longer. By the
grace of God, you’ve been saved. Now go
forth and be a fisher of men so that
others might know the truth.’”
It was,
ironically, the election of Obama that
encouraged Hale to join the Air Force.
“I thought
Obama, who as a candidate opposed the war in
Iraq, would end the wars and lawlessness of
the Bush administration,” he says.
However, a few
weeks after he took office, Obama approved
the deployment of an
additional 17,000
troops to Afghanistan, where 36,000 U.S.
troops and 32,000 NATO troops were already
deployed.
By the end of
the year, Obama increased troop levels in
Afghanistan again by 30,000, doubling U.S.
casualties. He also massively expanded the
drone program, raising the number of drone
strikes from several dozen the year before
he took office to 117 by his second year in
office. By the time he left office, Obama
had presided over 563 drone strikes that
killed approximately
3,797 people, many of whom were civilians.
Obama
authorized “signature
strikes”
allowing the C.I.A. to carry out drone
attacks against groups of suspected
militants without getting positive
identification. His administration approved
“follow-up”
or “double-tap” drone strikes, which
deployed drones to strike anyone who
assisted those injured in the initial drone
strike.
The Bureau of
Investigative Journalists reported in
2012 that “at least 50 civilians were killed
in follow-up strikes when they had gone to
help victims,” during Obama’s first three
years in office. Additionally, “more than 20
civilians have also been attacked in
deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners”
the report read. Obama expanded the
footprint of the drone program in Pakistan,
Somalia and Yemen, and established drone
bases in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
“There are
several such lists, used to target
individuals for different reasons,” Hale
writes in an essay titled, “Why I Leaked the
Watchlist Documents,” originally published
anonymously in May 2016 in the book The
Assassination Complex: Inside the
Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program by
Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The
Intercept.
“Some lists are
closely kept; others span multiple
intelligence and local law enforcement
agencies,” Hale writes in the essay.
“There are
lists used to kill or capture supposed
‘high-value targets,’ and others
intended to threaten, coerce, or simply
monitor a person’s activity. However,
all the lists, whether to kill or
silence, originate from the Terrorist
Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE),
and are maintained by the Terrorist
Screening Center at the National
Counterterrorism Center. The existence
of TIDE is unclassified, yet details
about how it functions in our government
are completely unknown to the public. In
August 2013 the database reached a
milestone of one million entries. Today,
it is thousands of entries larger and is
growing faster than it has since its
inception in 2003.”
The Terrorist
Screening Center, he writes, not only stores
names, dates of birth, and other identifying
information of potential targets but also
stores “medical records, transcripts, and
passport data; license plate numbers, email,
and cell-phone numbers (along with the
phone’s International Mobile Subscriber
Identity and International Mobile Station
Equipment Identity numbers); your bank
account numbers and purchases; and other
sensitive information, including DNA and
photographs capable of identifying you using
facial recognition software.”
Suspects’ data
is collected and pooled by the intelligence
alliance formed by Australia, Canada, New
Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United
States, known as the
Five Eyes.
Each person on the list is assigned a TIDE
personal number, or TPN.
“From Osama bin
Laden (TPN 1063599) to Abdulrahman Awlaki
(TPN 26350617), the American son of Anwar al
Awlaki, anyone who has ever been the target
of a covert operation was first assigned a
TPN and closely monitored by all agencies
who follow that TPN long before they were
eventually put on a separate list and
extrajudicially sentenced to death,” Hale
wrote.
As Hale exposed
in the leaked documents, the more than one
million entries in the TIDE database include
about 21,000 U.S. citizens.
“When the
President gets up in front of the nation and
says they are doing everything they can to
ensure there is near certainty there will be
no civilians killed, he is saying that
because he can’t say otherwise, because
anytime an action is taken to finish a
target there is a certain amount of
guesswork in that action,” Hale says in the
award-winning documentary “National
Bird,”
a film about whistleblowers in the U.S.
drone program who suffered moral injury and
PTSD. “It’s only in the aftermath of any
kind of ordinance being dropped that you
know how much actual damage was done.
Oftentimes, the intelligence community is
reliant, the Joint Special Operations
Command, the CIA included, is reliant on
intelligence coming afterwards that confirms
that who they were targeting was killed in
the strike, or that they weren’t killed in
that strike.”
“The people who
defend drones, and the way they are used,
say they protect American lives by not
putting them in harm’s way,” he says in the
film.
“What they
really do is embolden decision makers
because there is no threat, there is no
immediate consequence. They can do this
strike. They can potentially kill this
person they are so desperate to
eliminate because of how potentially
dangerous they could be to the U.S. But
if it just so happens that they don’t
kill that person, or some other people
involved in the strike get killed as
well, there are no consequences for it.
When it comes to high-value targets,
[in] every mission you go after one
person at a time, but anybody else
killed in that strike is blankly assumed
to be an associate of the targeted
individual. So as long as they can
reasonably identify that all of the
people in the field view of the camera
are military-aged males, meaning anybody
who is believed to be age 16 or older,
they are a legitimate target under the
rules of engagement. If that strike
occurs and kills all of them, they just
say they got them all.”
Drones, he
says, make remote killing “easy and
convenient.”
On Aug. 8,
2014, the F.B.I. raided Hale’s home. It was
his last day of work for the private
contractor. Two F.B.I. agents, one male and
one female, shoved their badges in his face
when he opened the door. About two dozen
agents, pistols drawn, many wearing body
armor, followed behind. They photographed
and ransacked every room. They confiscated
all his electronics, including his phone.
He spent the
next five years in limbo. He struggled to
find work, fought off depression and
contemplated suicide. In 2019, the Trump
administration indicted
Hale on
four counts of violating the Espionage Act
and one count of theft of government
property. As part of a plea deal, he pled
guilty to one count of violating the
Espionage Act.
“I am here to
answer for my own crimes and not that of
another person,” he said at his sentencing.
“And it
would appear that I am here today to
answer for the crime of stealing papers,
for which I expect to spend some portion
of my life in prison. But what I am
really here for is having stolen
something that was never mine to take:
precious human life. For which I was
well-compensated and given a medal. I
couldn’t keep living in a world in which
people pretended things weren’t
happening that were. My consequential
decision to share classified information
about the drone program with the public
was a gesture not taken lightly, nor one
I would have taken at all if I believed
such a decision had the possibility of
harming anyone but myself. I acted not
for the sake of self-aggrandizement but
that I might some day humbly ask
forgiveness.”
I know a few
Daniel Hales. They made my most important
reporting possible. They enabled truths to
be told. They held the powerful accountable.
They gave a voice to the victims. They
informed the public. They called for the
rule of law.
I sit across
from Hale and wonder if this is the end, if
he, and others like him, will be completely
silenced.
Hale’s
imprisonment is a microcosm of the vast
gulag being constructed for all of us.
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning
journalist who was a foreign correspondent
for 15 years for The New York Times, where
he served as the Middle East bureau chief
and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He
previously worked overseas for The
Dallas Morning News, The
Christian Science Monitor and NPR.
He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges
Report.”