U.S. military “whistleblower” Daniel Hale, who revealed classified information on Barack Obama’s assassinations by drone in Afghanistan, will be sentenced Tuesday, July 27, after pleading guilty earlier this year to violating the Espionage Act. Hale said a crisis of conscience drove him to leak classified information about the U.S. targeted drone assassination program in Afghanistan, Brett Wilkins reports in Common Dreams July 23.
Hale begins his11-page handwritten letter with a quote from U.S. Adm. Gene LaRocque, who said in 1995, “We now kill people without seeing them. Now you push a button thousands of miles away.… Since it’s all done by remote control, there’s no remorse.” But mental depression is a constant, says Hale.
The same year that Hale deployed to Afghanistan to support the Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations Task Force and was made responsible for identifying, tracking, and targeting “high-value” terror suspects, the New York Times reported that then-President Barack Obama dramatically increased U.S. drone strikes, and “embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties — that effectively counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” Hale wrote to the judge in his case: “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…. Notwithstanding, in 2012, a full year after the demise of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was part of killing misguided young men who were but mere children on the day of 9/11.… I came to believe that the policy of drone assassination was being used to mislead the public that it keeps us safe.”