Whistleblowers’ stories are not simple. And the case of intelligence community whistleblower Daniel Hale is no exception.
Hale’s documents were the source material for “The Drone Papers,” an explosive eight-part series published by The Intercept in 2015.
On March 31, Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst and defense contractor with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), pled guilty to the charge of “retention and transmission of national defense information” brought against him by the U.S. government. He will be sentenced for that charge on July 13. Four more counts against him, under the Espionage Act of 1917 and for theft of government property, remain pending.
Hale, who was in the Air Force from 2009 to 2013, was assigned to work with the National Security Agency and stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. While there, he helped identify targets for the U.S. drone assasination program. After leaving the Air Force, he became a defense contractor at the NGA and began speaking out publicly about the United State’s drone warfare policies.
According to the indictment and charges first brought against him in May 2019 by the Department of Justice, Hale printed a total of thirty-six documents during his time at NGA, at least seventeen of which he provided to a journalist. Eleven of these documents carried security designations of Secret or Top Secret. Although never officially confirmed, “unnamed government sources” have told other journalists that the reporter to whom Hale gave these documents was Jeremy Scahill, an investigative journalist with The Intercept.
Hale’s documents were the source material for “The Drone Papers,” an explosive eight-part series published by The Intercept in 2015, as well as for journalist Jeremy Scahill’s book The Assassination Complex (published in 2017). That series revealed to the American public the processes behind the U.S. military’s use of armed drones against targets in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including how terror suspects are targeted and their executions individually approved by the President.
Perhaps most shockingly, the series also revealed the program’s unintended victims, mostly civilians: During one five-month period between 2012 and 2013, nearly “90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”
The use of drones in foreign conflicts, The Intercept noted, is seen as a “more precise alternative to boots on the ground.” The program is popular across political party lines: President Barack Obama authorized 1,878 drone strikes during his time in office, and in the first two years of his presidency, Donald Trump ordered 2,243.
Hale acted as he did because he believed the public had a right to know how the drone program operated. He has spoken at a Drone Summit, hosted by the antiwar organization Codepink, and was featured in National Bird, Sonia Kennebeck’s 2016 documentary about drone warfare and assassinations.
When “a drone strike kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate . . . so it’s a phenomenal gamble.”
In “The Drone Papers,” Hale (named only as “the source”) made it clear that an over-reliance on potentially faulty technology and the imprecise nature of the targeting is one of the reasons he had to speak out: When “a drone strike kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate . . . so it’s a phenomenal gamble.”
The law being used to charge Hale is the Espionage Act of 1917. Among the Espionage Act’s more sinister features is that those charged under it are prohibited from offering an explanation of their actions to the jury deciding their case; another is that it allows for prison terms of up to ten years per charge. Although seldom used in the century in which it was passed—most notably against alleged spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg—the Obama Administration used this law to charge or convict whistleblowers in eight cases, more than in all previous administrations combined.
Former President Trump also showed a willingness to extend the use of the Espionage Act to silence journalists and publishers when his administration charged Julian Assange with seventeen counts of violating it.
Among those charged and sometimes convicted under the Espionage Act are Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning (Manning’s sentence was commuted by President Obama during his final days in office in 2017). As intelligence and national security whistleblowers, these individuals are portrayed as revealing defense secrets and placing military and intelligence personnel in danger.
But, in most cases, this is actually not true, according to Tom Mueller, author of the book Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing In An Age of Fraud. “It is widely recognized that secrecy in defense/intel and other ‘national security’ matters rarely has to do with national security,” Mueller says in an interview with The Progressive, “and far more often is used to hide wrongful or corrupt behavior, and to avoid embarrassment on the part of the perpetrators.”
Numerous organizations have now made statements in support of Daniel Hale, most notably First Amendment and whistleblower advocacy groups like Defending Rights and Dissent, and The Whistleblower and Source Protection Program, or WHISPeR. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press also filed a brief on Hale’s behalf, “supporting the defendant’s motion to dismiss the indictment.”
In that brief, the Reporters Committee concluded that “the material alleged to have been leaked is indisputably newsworthy and public visibility into drone operations is essential for democratic governance and accountability.”
Mueller agrees that whistleblowers perform a valuable service to the nation, in helping to balance the government’s need for secrecy with the public’s right to know the information that only national security sources and whistleblowers can provide.
“We need to abolish the vast majority of uses of secrecy, and realize that the armed forces, intel, and other security forces are our public servants, not our masters.”
“We need to abolish the vast majority of uses of secrecy, and realize that the armed forces, intel, and other security forces are our public servants, not our masters,” he says. “They do our work, with our tax dollars, in our name. We must receive a full account of what they do in this capacity, and ensure it aligns with our national values.”
Daniel Hale’s case has dragged on for years in a country where the news cycle often lasts about as long as the latest viral Twitter thread. He has, in fact, waited to learn his fate through three presidential administrations: he was investigated by Obama, charged by Trump, and will now be sentenced under President Joe Biden.
As further punishment, Hale, who had previously been on supervised release, was re-arrested in early May and charged with violating the terms of that release (an allegation that Hale denies). On May 7, he was incarcerated at the Alexandria Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia.
According to Jesselyn Radack (an attorney for whistleblowers who has served as Hale’s public representative), the government has indicated that this move was made out of concern for Hale’s mental health. Hale is now being held at the same facility where Chelsea Manning attempted suicide in 2020.
Hale’s story is not simple. But there is no doubt that he stands on the side of ideals like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom from fear—particularly for the civilians who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a drone is deployed.
Daniel Hale is a whistleblower in the truest sense of the term. At the very least, he deserves the chance to explain why he did what he did to a jury of his peers.