One year ago this July, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale stood in front of Judge Liam O’Grady at his sentencing and explained himself. After a lengthy investigation and prosecution, it was finally the day when Hale would find out if he would spend years in prison for doing something he felt morally obligated to do: Tell the truth about the United States’ drone program.
While working as a drone analyst in the U.S. Air Force in Afghanistan, he witnessed attacks waged against innocent civilians that, to this day, still haunt him. Those experiences eventually led him to blow the whistle on the drone program. Judge O’Grady said Hale wasn’t being punished for telling the truth, but for stealing government documents that disclose that truth. For that, Hale was subjected to a lengthy investigation and prosecution where he was charged under the Espionage Act, a law that was passed over 100 years ago to deal with spies but has been used to prosecute antiwar dissidents and whistleblowers.
But Daniel Hale is no spy. He is a person who could not live with himself if he did not tell the U.S. people what was being done in their name. Thanks to him, we had proof that the drone program wasn’t as targeted as we were being told. The prosecution accused Hale of leaking the information that was included in “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept. They included Pentagon documents that confirmed that in one drone operation in Afghanistan, 90 percent of the people killed were not the...
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