“I just plead with you to please let him go,” said Ruth Bray, the youngest sister of imprisoned drone whistleblower Daniel Hale, in an address to President Joe Biden at a press conference last week. Recounting the times she and her brother would spend in the snow as young children, Bray insisted Daniel was following his moral compass when he leaked documents exposing the deadly US drone program.
Hale’s sister was joined by Representative Ilhan Omar, Daniel Ellsberg, Steven Donzinger, and more supporters, as his friends and family pushed for the president to commute his sentence.
In July of 2021, Hale was sentenced to forty-five months in prison for exposing just how deadly the US drone program is. Prosecuted under the Espionage Act, Hale never had a chance to explain himself. On the day of his sentencing, he was able to speak for the first time in court, saying to the judge, “Please, I beg you, forgive me, your honor, for taking papers as opposed to the lives of others. I could not, God so help me, have done otherwise.”
Daniel leaked documents to the Intercept, which then published “The Drone Papers.” The documents showed that up to 90 percent of US drone victims killed in Operation Haymaker were not the intended target. If teenage boys were killed, they would simply be classified as “enemy combatants.”
The Drone Papers made people in the United States aware of what was being done in their name, with their tax dollars. Hale’s revelations also led to the removal of...
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