The roadblock strike is the episode John Kiriakou uses to explain why Daniel Hale became a whistleblower. Hale cited it himself in court during his sentencing.[1]
Hale was stationed at Bagram Air Base, about twenty miles north-west of Kabul, where the drone operators were based. His job was to take information from special forces in the field and control the drones flying above them.[2][1]
Special forces on the ground radioed that a car was approaching a U.S. roadblock rapidly and asked him to take it out. Hale flew the drone over the car and could see inside it a man, a woman and two little girls — he later learned they were six and nine years old. He reported that there were children in the car. The programme’s own rule, as Kiriakou states it, is that a rocket may not be fired where children under fourteen are present. He was ordered to fire anyway, because the car was approaching rapidly.[1][3]
The driver was in fact confused and had not realised he was approaching an American roadblock; he was driving at a normal speed. Hale was ordered a second time to fire, and “against his better judgment, he did.” The driver and his wife somehow survived. The girls were killed.[3][4]
The dumpster
What followed is the detail Kiriakou returns to. The parents panicked, afraid that the special forces would come and take their daughters’ bodies, and the father dragged the two girls’ bodies to a village dumpster alongside where the strike had happened and put them in it. It was later determined that both parents were innocent of any crime: “They were just confused. Their daughters were killed for absolutely no reason.”[5]
Kiriakou’s closing point is that the episode was not exceptional. Hale said “that was a normal part of the day — that our drone operators kill innocent people all the time, and the government just doesn’t want you to know about it.”[5][6]