Kiriakou had spent the session arguing that the persecution of national security whistleblowers is bipartisan — that Joe Biden was just as bad as Donald Trump and Trump just as bad as Barack Obama — when he asked to add one last thing.[1]
Who Hale was
There was, he said, a very important whistleblower out there right then by the name of Daniel Hale. Hale is the drone whistleblower, who went public with the fact that the United States was killing civilians — women, children and the elderly — in its drone programme.[1]
He had been scooped up by the Justice Department the previous week and was incarcerated at a federal holding facility in Alexandria, Virginia — which is to say, Kiriakou noted, the Eastern District of Virginia, the district in which he had himself been charged and in which no national security defendant has ever won.[1][2][3]
The condition he described
Kiriakou’s description of Hale’s state was blunt and, by the standards of a public event, unusually specific. The poor guy, he said, was terrified. He was on suicide watch. He was going through some dark days.[2]
Three weeks later, on Scott Horton’s show, the description had shifted from acute crisis to attrition. Hale was lonely, he was depressed, and — the detail Kiriakou dwells on — he had no idea what was going on in the world around him.[4]
The ask
What he asked the audience for was small and concrete. He had posted Hale’s address on Facebook and on Twitter. If you have five minutes, he said, send him a letter, send him a postcard — just tell him that he is not forgotten.[2]
He made the same appeal in print, in an article for Consortium News telling readers they could write to Hale and say how much they valued him and how badly they needed him to hang in there.[5]
The rules a letter had to obey
Asked on air how a stranger would actually go about it, Kiriakou answered with the jail’s mail regulations, which he had evidently learned in detail — and about which he was not diplomatic: “they’re real dicks about the rules over there at the federal lock-up in Alexandria.”[5]
A letter had to be on plain white paper with no lines, written in black ink, and could not contain any photographs.[6] Hale might not be able to answer, because he was allowed to purchase only ten stamps a week; he had said he would try to write back if he could get permission to buy extra ones.[5][4]
The most specific instruction came from the prisoner himself. Hale was desperate for news, and asked Kiriakou to please, please send news articles — but they had to be cut out and pasted onto a sheet of white paper with the photographs deleted, so that what arrived was just the words.[6]
The address
Kiriakou read the mailing address out on air, and then repeated it in full: Daniel E. Hale, William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center, 2001 Mill Road, Alexandria, Virginia 22314. He also pointed listeners to standwithdanielhale.org for further information.[4][7]
Why he asks for letters
The request draws directly on Kiriakou’s own experience of incarceration. He has said that so many people offered him a helping hand when he was at his lowest, and reached out to him proactively, that helping other whistleblowers afterwards was the least he could do.[8]
He also has a rule of his own about the traffic in both directions. On his very first day in prison he decided that if somebody was going to take time out of their day to sit down with a pen and paper and write to him, he was going to answer that letter — and he ended up answering more than seven thousand letters in the twenty-three months he served. Every one he received, he says, was a reminder that he was not alone.[9]
What he was asking for, in other words, was the thing he says worked on him: not advocacy, not legal help, but evidence delivered to a cell that somebody outside knew the man’s name.