ALEXANDRIA, July 23 (AP): A former Air Force intelligence analyst said he leaked government secrets about the drone program to a reporter because of his guilt of participating in deadly drone strikes in Afghanistan.
Daniel Hale of Nashville, Tennessee, is to be sentenced in the US District Court in Alexandria on Tuesday after pleading guilty to violating the Espionage Act by leaking top secret documents.
In court papers filed Thursday, Hale’s lawyers said he received a sentence of 12 to 18 months, which would be far below sentencing guidelines.
In an 11-page handwritten letter from the Alexandria prison where he is being held, Hale outlined what prompted him to break the law, describing his regret and horror as he watched gruesome videos of Afghans in part because His work helped track him down.
He said that when he was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, his job was to track cellphone signals associated with those believed to be enemy fighters.
“Not a day goes by when I don’t question the justification of my actions,” Hale wrote.
His guilt is further aggravated by the clinical nature of the drone strike program, in which Afghan targets go about their daily lives – many times innocent civilians are killed as collateral damage – rather than a conventional war. On the field.
Hale wrote, “The victorious rifleman, undeniably remorseful, retains his honor by at least facing off against his enemy on the battlefield.” “But what could I possibly have done to face the undeniable brutalities that I had committed?” As a result, he said, his conscience compelled him to disclose details about the program to an investigative reporter whom he had previously met. The documents showed, among other things, that the drone program was not as accurate as the government had claimed in terms of avoiding civilian deaths.
Hale leaked documents after leaving the Air Force and took a civilian job with a contractor assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, where he worked as a top name for a brief stint in 2014. done, used its Chinese language expertise to help label maps. .
Hale’s lawyers argued in court papers that his philanthropic motives, and the fact that the government showed no real damage from the leaks, should be taken into account for a lighter sentence.
“He committed the crime under the guise of secrecy to draw attention to unethical government conduct and the alleged accuracy of the United States military’s drone program, contrary to the public statements of then-President Obama,” defense attorney Todd Richman said. and Tal Mertz wrote.
However, prosecutors say the disclosure of classified documents has the potential to cause serious harm. In the sentencing papers, prosecutors Gordon Kromberg and Alexander Berang write that the documents leaked by Hale were found in an Internet compilation of material designed to help Islamic State fighters evade detection.
“(a) As a result of Hale’s actions, the world’s most vicious terrorists obtained documents classified by the United States as ‘secret’ and ‘top secret’ – and thought that such documents were transmitted to their own followers by their own Were valuable enough to have. own manuals,” wrote Kromberg and Berang.
Prosecutors say Hale’s leaks were more serious than those carried out by Reality Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor who was sentenced to five years under the Espionage Act for leaking classified documents to a journalist. It was the longest sentence awarded to a whistleblower prosecuted for
Prosecutors do not request a specific prison term, but say a suitable sentence would be “significantly longer” than the 63 months imposed on the winner. (AP) DIV DIV
(This story is published as part of an auto-generated Syndicate wire feed. Headline or body have not been edited by ABP Live.)
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