https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/10/trump_steps_up_war_on_whistleblowers?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=f94318df34-Daily_Digest_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-f94318df34-191715297Trump Steps up War on Whistleblowers: Air Force Vet Daniel Hale Arrested For Leaking Drone War Info
STORYMAY 10, 2019Watch iconWatch Full Show
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TOPICS
Whistleblowers
Drone Attacks
Afghanistan
Freedom of the Press
GUESTS
James Risen
The Intercept’s senior national security correspondent, a best-selling author and a former New York Times reporter. He is also director of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund.
LINKS
Read the Department of Justice Indictment
"National Bird"
Intercept Statement on Arrest of Daniel Hale
A former U.S. intelligence analyst was arrested Thursday and charged with violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking documents about the secretive U.S. drone program.
Daniel Hale, 31, was arrested in Nashville. He faces up to 50 years in prison. Hale is accused of disclosing 11 top secret or secret documents to a reporter. The indictment does not name the reporter but unnamed government sources have told media outlets that the reporter is investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept. In 2015, The Intercept published a special report called the Drone Papers exposing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. We air excerpts of the documentary “National Bird” that features Daniel Hale and speak to The Intercept’s James Risen, director of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, “Democracynow.org”:
https://www.democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
A former U.S. intelligence analyst was arrested Thursday and charged with violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking documents about the secretive U.S. drone program. 31-year-old Daniel Hale was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee. He faces up to 50 years in prison. Hale was enlisted in the Air Force from 2009 to 2013, during which he worked with the National Security Agency and the Joint Special Operations Task Force at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan where he helped identify targets to be assassinated. He later worked as a contractor for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Hale is accused of disclosing 11 top-secret or secret documents to a reporter. The indictment does not name the reporter, but unnamed government sources have told media outlets the reporter is investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept. In 2015, The Intercept published a special report called The Drone Papers exposing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. The publication’s findings were later turned into a book called The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program.
In a statement, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief Betsy Reed said, “The Intercept does not comment on matters relating to the identity of anonymous sources. In an indictment unsealed on May 9, the government alleges that documents on the U.S. drone program were leaked to a news organization. These documents detailed a secret, unaccountable process for targeting and k*****g people around the world, including U.S. citizens, through drone strikes. They are of vital public importance, and activity related to their disclosure is protected by the First Amendment.” Reed went on to say, “The alleged whistleblower faces up to 50 years in prison. No one has ever been held accountable for k*****g civilians in drone strikes,” she said.
After leaving the Air Force in 2013, Daniel Hale began publicly speaking out against the drone program. In November 2013, he spoke at a drone summit in Washington, D.C., organized by CODEPINK.
DANIEL HALE: Before I begin, one last thing. I just would like to in a way say I am sorry. I am not up here for any good reasons. And to the people in the audience who are victims, or who are families of victims, or have families who live in countries where U.S. militarism and specifically unmanned systems are conducting kinetic strikes, I am sorry. Because I am up here because I was, for a time, a short period of time during my military career as an analyst, working with unmanned systems and deployed to Afghanistan. And at the very least, you all deserve an apology.
AMY GOODMAN: In January 2014, Daniel Hale spoke at a rally outside the White House calling for the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo.
DANIEL HALE: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Daniel Hale. I was a veteran in the United States Air Force from 2009 until 2013. Through my experience and my deployment to Afghanistan, where I was primarily tasked with pursuing high-value targets through the utilization of unmanned systems or otherwise known as drones, I came to learn of the thousands of prisoners who remain at the prison in Bagram Air Force Base to this day who are in similar situations to those at Guantánamo, who are continually held indefinitely for benign or otherwise petty offenses or reasons not given to them whatsoever.
AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Hale was also featured in the documentary National Bird about drone warfare whistleblowers. It was directed by Sonia Kennebeck.
DANIEL HALE: People would defend drones and defend the way that they’re used. They always say, you know, they protect American lives by not putting them in harm’s way. Well, what they really do is they just embolden commanders. They embolden decision-makers. Because there is no threat. There is no immediate consequence. They can do the strike and they can potentially k**l this person that they’re so desperate to get and to eliminate because of how dangerous, potentially dangerous they could be to the U.S.
But if it just so happens that they don’t k**l that person or some other people are involved in the strike and get k**led as well, there’s no consequence for it. When it comes to high-value targeting, every mission is to go after one person at a time. But anybody else that’s k**led in that strike is just blanketly 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 of view of the camera are military-aged males, meaning anybody who is believed to be of age 16 or older, they are a legitimate target under the rules of engagement. If that strike occurs and k**ls all of them, they just say that they got ’em all.
AMY GOODMAN: Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale speaking in the documentary National Bird. In August 2014, the FBI raided Hale’s house, but the Obama Justice Department never filed charges. In the film, Hale spoke about the possibility of being indicted.
DANIEL HALE: Personally, I just live every day trying to become more and more comfortable with the idea that it’s probably going to happen. That I’m probably going to get indicted, and I’m probably going to get charged with a crime and that there’s probably a real chance that I’ll have to fight to stay out of prison.
AMY GOODMAN: Those are the words of drone whistleblower Daniel Hale, who was arrested in Nashville on Thursday. After appearing in court, he was released under pretrial supervision. His next court hearing is May 17th. According to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Hale is at least the sixth alleged journalistic source charged by the Trump administration over the past two years.
We are now joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen. He is a former New York Times reporter who is now The Intercept's senior national security correspondent. He is also director of First Look Media's Press Freedom Defense Fund. First Look is the parent company of The Intercept. Risen himself was involved in a high-profile press freedom case involving former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who was jailed after being convicted under the Espionage Act for speaking with Risen. James Risen, welcome back to Democracy Now! It is great to have you with us. First, can you respond to the arrest of Daniel Hale?
JAMES RISEN: Well, I think I can’t comment specially on this case, but what I can say is that this is yet another escalation of the war on the press by the Trump administration. Donald Trump has taken the war on the press that George Bush and Barack Obama started and has now escalated it beyond anything we have ever seen. The Justice Department under Trump has been so thoroughly politicized that they are going after every possible whistleblower and reporter and any kind of leak that they can find in order to silence the press and silence whistleblowers who are trying to reveal the t***h about both the national security state and other aspects of the Trump Administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, can you explain why it is you think he was arrested now? What they are alleging happened something like five years ago under the Obama Justice Department, which decided not to charge Daniel Hale.
JAMES RISEN: That’s why I’m saying I think this is part of Trump’s escalation of the war on the press beyond anything we have seen before. They’re going back over every possible leak they can find, over every old open case and trying to escalate things beyond what Obama did. I think you saw that with the Julian Assange case, where the Obama administration had investigated him for years and never taken the final step of indicting him, and then the Trump Administration did so.
So I think you are seeing that the Justice Department, which has been under such enormous pressure from Trump on a wide range of issues, particularly the Russia investigation where he has constantly been pressuring one attorney general after another. I think that the Justice Department finds it much easier to give in to him on leak investigations than on other things. They are happy to go after journalists and their sources. And so they are satisfying Trump’s demand to punish the press for what he—he does not like bad press. He gets a lot of bad press. And so he is going after—he’s trying to punish the press in the ways that he knows he can.