Anti-war and First Amendment advocates are among those ramping up pressure on President Joe Biden to commute the 45-month prison sentence of Daniel Hale, a former Air Force intelligence analyst and Pentagon employee who disclosed documents regarding the U.S. drone assassination program and was convicted last year of violating the Espionage Act.
Human rights attorney Steven Donziger and political activist Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked classified information about the U.S. war in Vietnam to the New York Times five decades ago in what became known as the Pentagon Papers, are scheduled to join Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at a press conference Thursday morning where they plan to appeal to the president and highlight what the congresswoman called Hale’s “courageous” and “patriotic” actions.
“What he did was a public service, informing the debate on an issue that has spent far too long in the shadows,” Omar told Common Dreams on Wednesday. “I will continue to push for a full pardon for his actions, and short of that, a commutation of his sentence.”
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Hale worked as an intelligence analyst for the Air Force between 2009 and 2013. He began identifying, tracking, and targeting “high-value” terrorism suspects in 2012 in Afghanistan while working with the DOD’s Joint Special Operations Task Force.
He began communicating with a journalist the following year and after being honorably discharged from the Air...
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