Thread by @kgosztola

Ahead of sentencing on July 27, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale penned a letter to the judge highlighting his experiences with US drone strikes in Afghanistan and how he "came to violate the Espionage Act."

I'll go through Hale's letter in this thread.

thedissenter.org/daniel-hale-le…

Hale describes his role in the US military's drone program, when he was deployed to Afghanistan. He tracked down "the geographic location of handset cellphone devices believed to be in the possession of so-called enemy combatants."

Hale recounts first time he witnessed US drone strike.

"I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden terrifying flurry of Hellfire missiles came crashing down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning mountain."

"In 2012, a full year after the demise of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was a part of killing misguided young men, who were but mere children on the day of 9/11," Hale adds, as he contemplates the graphic violence he continued to observe after that first drone strike.

Hale: "The most harrowing day of my life came months into my deployment to Afghanistan when a routine surveillance mission turned into disaster."

In detail, Hale recalls witnessing a drone strike that injured and killed two children.

In 2013, Yemeni engineer Faisal bin Ali Jaber came to D.C. to share his story of how US drone strike in 2012 killed two of his relatives. Hale attended the CODEPINK Drone Summit, where Jaber spoke.

He remembers watching the carnage that unfolded.

After returning from his deployment in Afghanistan, Hale took a job with a defense contractor and worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He says one moment, where co-workers asked him to join them in watching drone strike footage or "war porn," pushed him to act.

"The truest truism that I’ve come to understand about the nature of war is that war is trauma. I believe that any person either called upon or coerced to participate in war against their fellow man is promised to be exposed to some form of trauma," Hale shares.

Hale could not suppress his conscience any longer.

"Left to decide whether to act, I only could do that which I ought to do before God and my own conscience. The answer came to me, that to stop cycle of violence, I ought to sacrifice my own life and not that of another person."

As Biden winds down US military involvement in Afghanistan, a conflict spanning nearly 20 years, the US Justice Department is seeking the harshest sentence ever for a leak against this conscientious individual, who is an Afghanistan War veteran.

Hale's letter could be viewed as plea for mercy from the judge, but more than anything, it outlines a defense of his actions that the US government and a US court would never have allowed him to present before a jury because there is no public interest defense under Espionage Act

This is the first Espionage Act conviction against a whistleblower under President Joe Biden.

While Biden's Justice Department did not indict Hale, they have spitefully seen this through to the end.

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