by Binoy Kampmark / July 28th, 2021
In May 2019, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that famous bastion of anti-whistleblowing fervour, unsealed an indictment charging former intelligence analyst Daniel Everett Hale with five counts of providing classified information to a reporter. The first four focused on obtaining national defense information, retaining and transmitting that information, causing the communication of that same information and disclosing classified communications intelligence information. The fifth alleged the theft of government property.
Yet again, the US government was making use of the beastly Espionage Act of 1917. Between 2009 and 2013, Hale worked with the US Air Force and National Security Agency. He was then contracted by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to work as a toponymist.
In a letter filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, Hale said he leaked the material after becoming traumatized by witnessing and participating in U.S. drone strikes that killed innocent civilians.
“I came to believe that the policy of drone assassination was being used to mislead the public that it keeps us safe,” wrote Hale, who served in the Air Force during the Obama presidency from 2009 to 2013.
“I only could do that which I ought to do before God and my own conscience,” Hale added in the 11-page letter he wrote from jail ahead of his sentencing hearing.
Federal prosecutors first charged Hale during the Trump administration in March 2019, accusing him of leaking more than a dozen classified documents he obtained while employed by a U.S. defense contractor.
Chris Hedges: The price of conscience
RT.com
29 Jul 2021, 08:12 GMT+10
This week, drone warfare whistleblower Daniel Hale has been sentenced to 45 months in prison for telling the American people the truth.
Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force who as a private contractor in 2013
The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013 US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90% 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.
President Biden reportedly told intelligence officials that there is a possibility of an extinction-level war with a major nuclear power over a cyber breach. 28.07.2021, Sputnik International
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