On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the prosecution and sentencing of former intelligence analyst, Daniel Hale, with his lawyer Jesselyn Radack.
Daniel Hale, a former intelligence analyst in the drone program for the Air Force, who as a private contractor in 2013 leaked some 17 classified documents about drone strikes to the press, was sentenced on Tuesday to 45 months in prison.
The documents, published by The Intercept, exposed that, between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90% of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”
The Justice Department coerced Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public the lies and crimes of government. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and to leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison.
The sentencing of Hale is one more potentially mortal blow to the freedom of the press. It follows in the wake of the prosecutions and imprisonment of other whistleblowers under the Espionage Act including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held at black sites. Those charged under the act are treated as if they were spies. They are barred from explaining motivations and intent to the court. They cannot provide evidence to the court of the government lawlessness and war crimes they exposed.
The bipartisan onslaught against the press – Barack Obama used the Espionage Act eight times against whistleblowers, more than all other previous administrations combined – by criminalizing those within the system who seek to inform the public is ominous for our democracy. It is effectively extinguishing all investigations into the inner workings of power.
