Ex-airman: Guilt over drone strikes prompted to leak secrets
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
No such thing as a clean war.
UpInArms
(51,253 posts)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
(93,873 posts)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
(51,253 posts)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
(11,170 posts)Response to Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin (Original post)
ExTex This message was self-deleted by its author.
EX500rider
(10,532 posts)Esp the Air Force, their job has always been to rain death from above.
Sewa
(1,242 posts)Some people have an issue with killing children and innocent civilians.
paleotn
(17,781 posts)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
(12,092 posts)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
(12,092 posts)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
(37,748 posts)Not too sure why you believe your sympathy towards him is even indirectly relevant.
MarineCombatEngineer
(12,092 posts)I don't give a fuck if he asked for sympathy from me or not. i just stated my feelings towards this traitor.
MarineCombatEngineer
(12,092 posts)usual irrelevant nonsense to me.
TiberiusB
(484 posts)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
(12,092 posts)just as much a traitor as the 1/6 traitors and he deserves to be in Fed. prison.
EX500rider
(10,532 posts)Sewa
(1,242 posts)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
(706 posts)...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
(484 posts)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
(10,532 posts)TiberiusB
(484 posts)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
(10,532 posts)...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
(484 posts)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
(10,532 posts)betsuni
(25,137 posts)Concern about drones disappeared once Trump became president.
Eugene
(61,595 posts)Source: Associated Press
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. governments 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 OGrady 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 governments 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