Ex-airman: Guilt over drone strikes prompted to leak secrets

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Source: AP

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A former Air Force intelligence analyst said his guilt over participating in lethal drone strikes in Afghanistan led him to leak government secrets about the drone program to a reporter.

Daniel Hale of Nashville, Tennessee, is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria after pleading guilty to violating the Espionage Act by leaking top secret documents.

In court papers filed Thursday, Hale's lawyers asked that he receive a 12- to 18-month sentence, which would be well below sentencing guidelines.

In an 11-page handwritten letter from the Alexandria jail where he's being held, Hale outlines what led him break the law, describing his regret and horror as he saw gruesome videos of Afghans killed in part because his work helped track them down.



Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ex-airman-guilt-over-drone-strikes-prompted-to-leak-secrets/ar-AAMrU8T?li=BBnb7Kz

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No such thing as a clean war.

[UpInArms]

1. I will say, as I have since 911

that Afghanistan was not responsible for bin laden … and should never have been a target … war is never the answer … and forever wars are even worse

[brooklynite]

23. You're part of a fairly small minority on that point.

I have no doubt President Gore would have sent in troops as well.

Whether or not the Taliban knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance, they aided and supported Al Queda during their earlier terrorist attacks, and did nothing to arrest or even stop them after 9/11.

[UpInArms]

24. Am used to being a "Small minority"

The drums of war were at a fevered pitch … and many were swept up in the desire to kill

….

Somehow, that whole mindset never appealed to me

[ItsjustMe]

2. This reminds me of the movie

Good Kill

[EX500rider]

4. I wonder what he thought the military's job was when he joined.

Esp the Air Force, their job has always been to rain death from above.

[Sewa]

5. He probably didn't think about killing children

Some people have an issue with killing children and innocent civilians.

[paleotn]

7. Then he followed the wrong career path...

Despite all the slick advertising, the military's job is to kill people and break things. They protect the country, yes, by either killing people and breaking things or threatening to do so. An unfortunate necessity in a less than perfect world. In war, even just wars, the deaths of innocent people are inevitable. Today few of us can even imagine the scale of exactly that kind of carnage brought on by the bombing of German and Japan in WWII.

Not excusing it. Just pointing out that it is something we cannot escape. Not in an imperfect world. Those thinking about military service need to fully understand that before they sign up.

My father didn't want me to serve. Not that he didn't think it honorable. Far from it, since he was proud of his own service. He just didn't want me to see the same things he saw in WWII Europe. When I decided to take the plunge anyway, he clued me in on what I could potentially see and do. No varnish. No rah rah bullshit. The straight story. We talked about it philosophically and I entered the service eyes wide open. I think that enhanced my time in uniform by really understanding the gravity of what I was doing.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

9. Same with my father, he fought in the Pacific and Korea and didn't want me

to join the Marines because of Vietnam heating up, but I was set on joining so he sat me down and told be the unvarnished truth of war and the effects it has on the human psyche.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

8. Then he should have gone about it the correct way,

as far as I'm concerned, he's just as much of a traitor as those that stormed the Capitol on 1/6 and deserves what's coming to him.
No sympathy from this retired Marine.

[LanternWaste]

10. Thankfully for everyone, he's not asking for your sympathy.

Not too sure why you believe your sympathy towards him is even indirectly relevant.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

11. You misunderstand me,

I don't give a fuck if he asked for sympathy from me or not. i just stated my feelings towards this traitor.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

12. Not sure why you thought you needed to reply to me with your

usual irrelevant nonsense to me.

[TiberiusB]

13. Internal channels or otherwise, it's a huge risk to their safety

and the Pentagon and the government hardly have a sterling record of treating whistleblowers fairly.

[link:https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/07/why-intelligence-whistleblowers-cant-rely-on-internal-channels/375127/|

[link:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon-punished-nsa-whistleblowers|

[link:https://www.aclu.org/video/why-are-whistleblowers-being-prosecuted-spies|

[link:https://www.vox.com/2019/11/27/20984526/america-fails-whistleblowers-classified-information|

[link:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/16/whistleblowers-double-standard-obama-david-petraeus-chelsea-manning|

[MarineCombatEngineer]

14. He still broke the law and this doesn't change my opinion that he's

just as much a traitor as the 1/6 traitors and he deserves to be in Fed. prison.

[EX500rider]

16. I read the whole article, there was no mention of children, that your own embellishment?

[Sewa]

19. It was mentioned in another article I read regarding this case

The driver stopped, got out of the car, and checked himself as though he could not believe he was still alive. Out of the passenger side came a woman wearing an unmistakable burka... And in the back were their two young daughters, ages five and three years old... The eldest was found dead due to unspecified wounds caused by shrapnel that pierced her body. Her younger sister was alive but severely dehydrated.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/07/23/pre-sentencing-letter-drone-whistleblower-daniel-hale-says-crisis-conscience

[Mawspam2]

6. Re the military...

...If you can't do the crime, don't sign on the line. You're not signing up for a bake sale. The expressed reason to join any branch (save maybe the Coast Guard) is to kill other people. Everything else, the parades, the shiny medals, is window dressing for your true job, working for a death factory.

[TiberiusB]

15. So the military is only here to kill anyone regardless of the circumstances

He didn't say he was affected by the deaths of established enemy combatants. He expressly made a point about the seemingly indiscriminate deaths of civilians for committing the "crime" of being male and a certain age and in the vicinity of potentially the wrong people. The military is supposed to protect American interests, which pretty much means geo political leverage and economic resources and generally has little or nothing to do with national security, but that's another debate. Killing anyone they like is not part of the job description, though it is often how they behave.

[EX500rider]

17. The Taliban & ISIS both fighting out of uniform is what causes the civilian deaths.

[TiberiusB]

20. The U.S. abandoning Afghanistan for Iraq opened the door to the Taliban to return

and the destabilization of Iraq and the surrounding region created ISIS. Even if you ignore the many accounts of U.S. military and contractor abuses and outright murder, it was the U.S. lack of direct security support for Afghanistan and the quagmire of Iraq that created the fertile ground for extremists to take hold. Had Iraq never been illegally invaded...let's repeat that, ILLEGALLY invaded...there would be no ISIS, massive civilian casualties would have been avoided, and, had we focused on Afghanistan, the Taliban suppressed.

You don't get to knock over the hornet's nest and then blame the hornets when others get stung.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/biden-iraq-invasion-america-afghanistan/618640

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/29/isis-iraq-war-islamic-state-blowback

[EX500rider]

21. And all that is irrelevant as to whether the Taliban fighting out of uniform..

...is the primary cause of civilian death inflicted by US forces and allies.
The overall primary cause of civilian deaths in Afghanistan is the Taliban themselves of course.

Also if US troops in Iraq was the reason the Taliban weren't suppressed I'd point out the US pulled out of Iraq 10 years ago in 2011. US troops levels not including NATO allies peaked at 100,000.

[TiberiusB]

22. Why would a troop withdrawal from Iraq fix Afghanistan

I didn't debate the number of civilian casualties or which force was the greater cause. I pointed out that many would have been avoided had the U.S. not turned away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq.
That diversion left an inadequate security force to protect against a resurgent Taliban.
The U.S. Iraq troop reduction in 2011 is irrelevant to Afghanistan and Iraq was in chaos after the invasion and still struggles to this day.

[EX500rider]

25. US troops peaked at 100,000 + NATO troops, how many did you want?

[betsuni]

18. I knew it would be during the Obama administration.

Concern about drones disappeared once Trump became president.

[Eugene]

26. Ex-airman sentenced to 45 months for leaking drone info

Source: Associated Press

Ex-airman sentenced to 45 months for leaking drone info

By ERIC TUCKER
July 27, 2021

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A former Air Force intelligence analyst was sentenced to 45 months in prison on Tuesday for leaking top secret information about the U.S. government’s drone strike program to a journalist.

Daniel Hale of Nashville, Tennessee, has said he was motivated by guilt when he disclosed to an investigative reporter details of a military drone program that he believed was indiscriminately killing civilians in Afghanistan far from the battlefield.

In issuing the sentence, U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady cited the need to deter others from disclosing government secrets and told Hale that he had other options besides sharing classified information with a reporter.

The prosecution is one in a series of cases the Justice Department has brought in recent years against current and former government officials who have disclosed classified secrets to journalists. As in other other leak cases, the arguments Tuesday were less about whether Hale illegally shared information — he has openly acknowledged having done so — and more on whether the action harmed national security and the extent to which his motives should be taken into position.

Prosecutors have argued that Hale, who deployed to Afghanistan in August 2012 and was honorably discharged less than a year later, abused the government’s trust and knew the documents he was sharing “risked causing serious, and in some cases exceptionally grave, damage to the national security” but leaked them anyway. The prosecutors say documents leaked by Hale were found in an internet compilation of material designed to help Islamic State fighters avoid detection.

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-dd3111dc6e49c373dea806428edd4321