Daniel Hale
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Daniel Hale is, per John Kiriakou, an NSA contractor and drone targeting analyst who recognized "very early on" that the U.S. drone program was carrying out "illegal strikes on civilian targets" across Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia. He took his objections to Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept and appeared in the documentary National Bird, revealing that the program was responsible for an 80% death rate among civilians. Kiriakou, a friend, calls him "a bona fide American hero."

From operator to whistleblower

The path from the Air Force to the drone programme

Hale joined the U.S. Air Force in 2009 and was assigned to the drone programme in Afghanistan in 2013, first identifying targets for assassination and then operating the drones and firing the missiles himself. He recognised early that many targets were mistakes, civilians, including children, objected, and developed severe PTSD from what he describes as the killing of children. He left the Air Force in 2014.

What he disclosed

Kiriakou states the disclosure in one sentence: "the government was lying to us when they said that the drone program was this laser-focused advanced program that just killed bad guys." The official line was that civilian deaths were so few they could be counted on one hand. What Hale revealed was that at least 40% of the deaths by drone were of innocent civilians.

The figures Kiriakou attaches in his own voice are the ones from the Drone Papers: during one five-month period in 2012, "nearly 90 per cent of those people killed in drone strikes were not the intended targets but civilian bystanders," and innocent people killed "were classified as enemies killed in action unless proven otherwise."

His argument for why that mattered runs past the public to the oversight committees: they "deserve to know information like that because they're the ones who are supposed to be overseeing the program. And if you don't have the truth, then how can you do your job?" His verdict: "we owe him a debt of gratitude."

Going public

He went "semi-public" first, taking seventeen classified documents out of his work area, scanning them and emailing them to The Intercept, which began a series on the drone programme and ran an op-ed he had written under the byline Anonymous. The FBI worked out it was him and raided his Virginia home later that year, which did not dissuade him. He appeared in the 2016 documentary National Bird, nominated for an Academy Award, and that "is kind of what pushed him over the edge": he decided to use his own name and accept the consequences, and was arrested soon after, in 2019, under the Trump administration.

The strike

Hale, trained by the U.S. Air Force as a drone operator, was working a screen from an office park, in some accounts a base in Nevada, while his superior watched the same feed from Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base, given elsewhere as McDill. Ordered to fire on a target beside two children, Hale protested that he could see two little girls; his superior told him, "Those aren't kids. Those are goats," and then, "Fire or be court-martialed." He fired, killing a 9-year-old and a 12-year-old girl, whose bloody bodies were found two hours later when the team went to confirm the strike.

The fuller exchange, as Hale described it to Kiriakou personally, ran through several refusals. Hale reported "I have eyes on the target," and the commander answered "fire." Hale said "wait a minute, he's with two little kids." The commander answered: "Those aren't kids. Those are goats." Hale insisted: "I'm looking at them, they're not goats, they're children. They're girls." The commander answered "fire" again. Hale refused. The commander threatened him with court martial. Hale fired the missile. He killed "a 12-year-old girl and a nine-year-old girl."

In a third telling the target is a car circling in Afghanistan, and the denial is of the feed rather than of the children's species.

> "And he says, 'I can see children in the car.' And then the guy told him, 'Fire.' 'Well, we're not supposed to fire. There are children in the car.' 'There are no children in the car. I'm looking at the same feed you are. Fire.' Well, eventually he fired and he killed two little girls. And he said he can never forgive himself. He's a murderer and there's nothing he can do to change that."

Hale suffered what Kiriakou describes as the equivalent of a nervous breakdown, telling his girlfriend that night, "I became a child killer today," and calling himself, in Kiriakou's words, "a child murderer." Kiriakou contrasts this with the Pentagon's practice of awarding medals to drone operators, "medals for killing children."

Prosecution and sentencing

The plea

Hale's federal public defenders read the half-dozen counts as duplicative and advised him to plead guilty to one and hope the judge agreed the rest were redundant. On March 31, 2021 he therefore entered a guilty plea to a single count under the Espionage Act, carrying a 10-year maximum, with no deal on the table, hoping the judge would take pity and dismiss the four other counts; because he pleaded on his own rather than as part of a deal, prosecutors refused to drop them, leaving him facing what Kiriakou called "50 years in prison." The case sat in the Eastern District of Virginia, "notoriously anti-whistleblower", but drew Judge Liam O'Grady. A court-appointed psychiatrist, fearing Hale was suicidal, had him placed in solitary confinement "for his own safety," which Kiriakou argues had the opposite effect.

The hearing

Kiriakou describes sitting with fellow whistleblower Tom Drake at the sentencing hearing, where prosecutors sought nine to eleven years, citing Kiriakou's own sentence, which prosecutors said, in hindsight, had been "too short", along with the Jeffrey Sterling and Reality Winner cases as sentencing benchmarks. The judge referenced Kiriakou's own 30-month sentence (of which he served 23) as an explicit benchmark, remarking that Jeffrey Sterling, who went to trial rather than plead, had received "Kiriakou plus 12 months," and that Hale would receive "Kiriakou plus 16 months." Kiriakou notes prosecutors used the same baseless-motive theory against Hale that had been used against him, that he acted to "ingratiate himself with the media" and build a consulting business. During a closed session, after Hale mentioned "the Horn of Africa," prosecutors objected and a loud white-noise machine, the same type used at Guantanamo military tribunals, was switched on so attorneys could confer privately with the judge.

On 29 July 2021, with the courtroom packed by national-security whistleblowers, journalists, family and supporters, O'Grady sentenced Hale to 45 months against a government request Kiriakou gives here as 14 years, let him make a statement, and then dismissed all the remaining charges with prejudice, so that instead of the 75 years the government was seeking he received 45 months. The term was less than the sentence given to NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, which prosecutors had tried to use as the baseline. Outside the courtroom, Kiriakou told journalists that Hale should have been released with time served: "He doesn't belong in prison. We should be making statues to people like him, not sending them to Communications management units."

The arithmetic

Kiriakou explains the number was no accident: 45 months minus 15 for good behavior comes to about 36 months once time served is credited; minus 12 more months for completing the Residential Drug and Alcohol Program (RDAP) comes to 24; minus another six for halfway-house and home-confinement credit comes to about 18 months, exactly what Hale had hoped for going in.

His first reaction in the room was relief: "I was sitting with Tom Drake, the NSA whistleblower, and Tom and I hugged each other when we heard 40 months, because the government was asking for years and years and years." When Hale rang him from jail that night he walked him through why the number was smaller than it sounded, fifteen per cent off for good behaviour bringing it to thirty-four months, then six months of home confinement, six months of halfway house, and another twelve months off if he enrolled in RDAP for his drinking. "I said, dude, you're gonna do less than two years."

The sentencing statement

Kiriakou describes Hale as painfully introverted and uncomfortable speaking publicly, yet at sentencing he delivered roughly six pages of what Kiriakou called some of the most powerful oration he'd ever heard, "one of the most inspirational speeches that I've ever heard in my life", and one he told Thomas Drake "should be taught in American high school civics classes."

Hale identified himself as a descendant of Nathan Hale, quoting the line "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country", paraphrased in another telling as "I have but this one life to give in the service of my country." He told the judge the drone program had made him a "child killer" and "mass murderer" after he was ordered to fire on a car, killing one young girl and severely injuring her sister. Kiriakou quotes the core of it: "I believe that it is wrong to kill, but it is especially wrong to kill the defenceless. I shared what was necessary to dispel the lie that drone warfare keeps us safe, that our lives are worth more than theirs." Hale also said he had had to kill a part of his own conscience to do his job.

Against that, the prosecutor's position was that Hale "did not provide a public service, he endangered soldiers." Kiriakou's response is one line: "there is of course nothing at all to indicate that this was the case."

Prison

The order that was only a suggestion

The judge ordered Hale sent to the low-security prison at Butner, North Carolina, the Bureau of Prisons' national prison hospital complex, where he could be treated for severe PTSD and for alcohol. Kiriakou's gloss is drawn from his own sentence: "one of the things that I learned the hard way is that when the judge makes an order like that, it's not really an order, it's a suggestion. And it's usually ignored by the Bureau of Prisons." Where he was actually sent, over the sentencing judge's own recommendation, is at Liam O'Grady.

The Communications Management Unit

Hale was placed in a Communications Management Unit (CMU), a high-security facility Kiriakou says was designed for "the worst of the worst" but is used to silence people whose message is inconvenient for the government, which Kiriakou attributes to the Justice Department being upset at the shortness of Hale's sentence. Placement in the CMU made him ineligible for RDAP, the program that would otherwise have shortened his time. In Hale's case, classified-information hearings also barred his own lawyer from participation.

He went to the penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. "He's living in the cell that John Gotti died in. On his cell block, he's in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. And then one hour a day, he's allowed to go into a cage that's attached to his cell and walk around in circles in a 10 by 10 foot cage outside. He's not allowed any phone calls. He's not allowed to write letters. He's not allowed to have any communication with any other human beings." The block, he says, held the last surviving Abu Nidal prisoner, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, and "the most violent, the bloodiest Aryan Nation murderers."

The phone allowance

The detail Kiriakou offers as proof that the treatment was invented rather than applied is the pandemic phone allowance. Every prisoner in the system had 300 minutes a month; to ease the isolation of COVID the Bureau raised it to 400. "So they decided to give everybody 400 minutes except Daniel Hale. They said because he was convicted of espionage that he's not entitled to have contact with his family. Now they just made that up just off the top of their heads. But this is what he's up against. You can't win in this system."

Kiriakou stayed in close personal contact through the ordeal, urging the RDAP route and sharing advice from his own imprisonment, and publicized, through Consortium News, a letter-writing campaign, noting Hale could receive mail only on unlined white paper in black ink with no photographs, at the William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center in Alexandria, Virginia.

Kiriakou's assessment

"A bona fide American hero"

Opening a 2023 programme on Hale, Kiriakou set out both the verdict and the reason for it. "Daniel Hale is a bona fide American hero. I don't say that lightly." The distinction he draws is against his own standing position that motive does not matter: a whistleblower need only bring to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality or threats to public health or safety, "but Daniel Hale made his revelations because it was the right thing to do. He felt moral and ethical outrage at what he was seeing in his job as a drone operator, and he felt compelled to do something about it." The verdict is unqualified elsewhere too: "Daniel Hale is in my view a bona fide American hero. He had literally nothing to gain personally from his revelations ... he was reporting a crime, a war crime, and that this was the right thing to do."

Deliberate, not accidental

Kiriakou returns repeatedly to Hale's deliberateness. He is "an extraordinarily bright young man" whose "whistleblowing was calculated, he knew exactly what he was getting himself into. His revelations were not an accident." The choice he made was "to put the stories of untold victims of the drone programme, and the futures of possible drone victims, above his own well-being." He was not, in Kiriakou's phrase, "the proverbial accidental whistleblower."

The warning that was ignored

The morning after the Soleimani strike, Kiriakou opened his response by crediting the drone whistleblowers rather than analysing the target: "this is why we have such a great debt of gratitude to people like David Hale", the auto-captions' rendering of Hale's name, "one of the brave drone whistleblowers. He warned us that this was going to happen."

What Hale had warned about, in Kiriakou's framing, was the legal void rather than any single strike: "it's not legal to send drones to other countries and to just rocket people without due process, without the right to confront their accusers in a court of law before a jury of their peers. Whether we like their politics or not is irrelevant."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Espionage Act
- Solitary confinement
- RDAP program
