{"id":188864,"date":"2021-07-19T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T11:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=188864"},"modified":"2021-07-13T09:27:55","modified_gmt":"2021-07-13T08:27:55","slug":"bless-the-traitors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/07\/bless-the-traitors\/","title":{"rendered":"Bless the Traitors"},"content":{"rendered":"
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12 Jul 2021 – Daniel Hale exposed the widespread and indiscriminate murder of noncombatants in the global US drone war. For his heroism, he faces ten years in prison while those who oversee these war crimes continue their killing spree.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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\"\"<\/a>

Original illustration by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Daniel Hale, an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst, stood in the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 in his military uniform. He held up a sign that read \u201cFree Bradley Manning,\u201d who had not yet announced her transition. It was a singular act of conscience few in uniform had the strength to replicate. He had taken a week off from his job to join the protestors in the park. He was present at 6:00 am on October 14 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his first attempt to clear the park. He stood in solidarity with thousands of protestors, including many unionized transit workers, teachers, Teamsters and communications workers, who formed a ring around the park. He watched the police back down as the crowd erupted into cheers. But this act of defiance and moral courage was only the beginning.<\/p>\n

At the time, Hale was stationed at Fort Bragg. A few months later he deployed to Afghanistan\u2019s Bagram Air Force Base. He would later learn that that while he was in Zuccotti Park, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike some 12,000 miles away in Yemen that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the radical cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier. The Obama administration claimed it was targeting the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibrahim al-Banna, who it believed, incorrectly, was with the boy and his cousins, all of whom were also killed in the attack. That massacre of innocents became public, but there were thousands more such attacks that wantonly killed noncombatants that only Hale and those with top-security clearances knew about.<\/p>\n

Starting in 2013, Hale, while working as a private contractor, leaked some 17 classified documents about the drone program to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, although the reporter is not named in court documents. The leaked documents, published<\/a> by The Intercept\u00a0<\/a>on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as \u201cenemies killed in action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hale was coerced by Biden\u2019s Justice Department on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to \u201cretention and transmission of national security information\u201d and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. He is being held in the Alexandria Adult Detention Center in Virginia, awaiting sentencing on July 27. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison. He now faces up to a decade in prison.<\/p>\n

Tragically, his case has not garnered the attention it should. When Nick Mottern, of the\u00a0Ban Killer Drones<\/a>\u00a0campaign, accompanied artists projecting Hale\u2019s image on downtown walls in Washington, D.C., he found that everyone he spoke to was unaware of Hale\u2019s plight. Prominent human rights organizations, such as the ACLU and PEN, have largely remained silent and uninvolved. The group Stand with Daniel Hale<\/a> has called on President Biden to pardon Hale and end the use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers, mounted a letter-writing campaign to the judge to request leniency and is collecting donations for Hale\u2019s legal fund.<\/p>\n

\u201cDaniel Hale is one of the most consequential whistleblowers,\u201d Edward Snowden said on a May Day panel<\/a> held at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers.\u00a0 \u201cHe sacrificed everything \u2014 an incredibly courageous person \u2014 to tell us that the drone war, that, you know, is so obviously occurring to everyone else, but the government was still officially denying in so many ways, is here, it is happening, and 90 percent of the casualties in one five-month period were innocents or bystanders or not the target of the drone strike. We could not establish that, we could not prove that, without Daniel Hale\u2019s voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking on Democracy Now! with host Amy Goodman a few weeks later, Daniel Ellsberg agreed<\/a> that Hale \u201cacted very admirably, in a way that very, very few officials have ever done in showing the moral courage to separate themselves from criminal activities and wrongful activities of their own administration, and resist them, as well as exposing them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because Hale was charged under the Espionage Act, he, like other whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites, was not permitted to explain his motivations and intent to the court. Nor could he provide evidence to the court that the drone assassination program killed and wounded large numbers of noncombatants, including children. He faced trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, much of whose population has links to the military or intelligence community, and whose courts have become notorious for their harsh sentences on behalf of the government.<\/p>\n

The 2012 \u201cLiving Under Drones\u201d<\/a> report by the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic provides a detailed\u00a0documentation\u00a0of the human impact of US drone strikes in Pakistan. Drones often fire Hellfire missiles that are equipped with an explosive warhead of about 20 pounds. A Hellfire variant, known as the R9X, carries \u201can inert warhead,\u201d The New York Times reported. Instead of exploding, it hurls about 100 pounds of metal through a vehicle. The missile\u2019s other feature includes \u201csix long blades tucked inside,\u201d which deploy \u201cseconds before impact to slice up anything in its path\u201d \u2014 including, of course, people.<\/p>\n

The numbers of civilian dead from US drone strikes run into the thousands, if not tens of thousands. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization, for example, reported<\/a> that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, drone strikes killed between 2,562 and 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom an estimated 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children.<\/p>\n

Drones hover 24 hours a day in the skies over Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Without warning, the drones, operated remotely from Air Force bases as far away as Nevada, fire ordinance that obliterates homes and vehicles or kills whole groups of people in fields or attending community gatherings, funerals and weddings. The leaked banter of the young drone operators, who often treat the killings as if they are an enhanced video game, exposes the callousness of the indiscriminate killings. Drone operators refer to child victims of drone attacks as \u201cfun-sized terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEver step on ants and never give it another thought?\u201d Michael Hass, a former drone operator for the Air Force told The Guardian<\/a>.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s what you are made to think of the targets \u2014 as just black blobs on a screen. You start to do these psychological gymnastics to make it easier to do what you have to do \u2014 they deserved it, they chose their side. You had to kill part of your conscience to keep doing your job every day \u2014 and ignore those voices telling you this wasn\u2019t right.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ubiquitous presence of drones in the skies, and the awareness that at any moment these drones can kill you and your family, induces feelings of helplessness, anxiety and constant fear.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities,\u201d the 2012 report reads of the drone war in Pakistan. \u201cThose living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drones have become killing machines that mete out random death and usually permanently cripple those victims who survive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs,\u201d the report reads. \u00a0\u201cThose who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hale, now 33, always had doubts about the war, but he enlisted in 2009 when Obama assumed office. He hoped that Obama would undo the excesses and lawlessness of the Bush administration. Instead, Obama, a few weeks after he took office, approved the deployment of an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan where 36,000 U.S. troops and 32,000 NATO troops were already deployed. By the end of the year, Obama increased troop levels in Afghanistan again by 30,000, doubling U.S. casualties. He also massively expanded the drone program, raising the number of drone strikes from several dozen the year before he took office to 117 by his second year in office.\u00a0 By the time he left office Obama had presided over the killing of at least 3,000 suspected militants and hundreds of civilians. He authorized what are known as \u201csignature strikes\u201d allowing the CIA to carry out drone attacks against groups of suspected militants without getting positive identification. He spread the footprint of the drone war, establishing drone bases in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other overseas locations to expand attacks to Syria and Yemen. The Obama administration also indicted<\/a> eight whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined. The Biden administration, like the Trump and Obama administrations,\u00a0continues to launch\u00a0widespread global drone strikes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore I joined the military, I was well aware that what I was about to enter was something I was against, that I disagreed with,\u201d Hale says in the 2016 documentary film \u201cNational Bird.\u201d <\/a>\u201cI joined anyway out of desperation. I was homeless. I was desperate. I had nowhere else to go. I was on my last leg. The Air Force was ready to accept me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the film, Hale alludes to a difficult and chaotic childhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of funny, a little ironic too, because so far I\u2019m the only adult male in my entire family, immediate and external, who had not been to prison so far,\u201d he says. \u201cI come from a long lineage of prisoners, actually, a very proud tradition of fuck-ups who get drunk and go driving, or sell pot, or carry a gun when they shouldn\u2019t be carrying a gun, in the wrong place at the wrong time, a lot of that where I\u2019m from.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg and underwent language and intelligence training. He worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) in Afghanistan as an intelligence analyst identifying targets for the drone program. His Top Secret\/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS\/SCI) security clearance gave him access to the vast, global drone war hidden from public view and Obama\u2019s huge secret \u201ckill lists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are several such lists, used to target individuals for different reasons,\u201d he wrote in an essay titled \u201cWhy I Leaked the Watchlist Documents,\u201d originally published anonymously in the book \u201cThe Assassination Complex: Inside the Government\u2019s Secret Drone Warfare Program\u201d by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. The book is based on the leaked documents provided by Hale that first appeared as an eight-part series called \u201cThe Drone Papers\u201d published by The Intercept.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome lists are closely kept; others span multiple intelligence and local law enforcement agencies,\u201d Hale writes in the essay. \u201cThere are lists used to kill or capture supposed \u2018high-value targets,\u2019 and others intended to threaten, coerce, or simply monitor a person\u2019s activity. However, all the lists, whether to kill or silence, originate from the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, and they are maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center at the National Counterterrorism Center. The existence of TIDE is unclassified, yet details about how it functions in our government are completely unknown to the public. In August 2013 the database reached a milestone of one million entries. Today it is thousands of entries larger and is growing faster than it has since its inception in 2003.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Terrorist Screening Center, he writes, not only stores names, dates of birth, and other identifying information of potential targets, but also stores \u201cmedical records, transcripts, and passport data; license plate numbers, email, and cell-phone numbers (along with the phone\u2019s International Mobile Subscriber Identity and International Mobile Station Equipment Identity numbers); your bank account numbers and purchases; and other sensitive information, including DNA and photographs capable of identifying you using facial recognition software.\u201d<\/p>\n

Data on suspects is collected and pooled by the intelligence agencies known as the Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance formed by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each person on the list is assigned a TIDE personal number, or TPN.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom Osama bin Laden (TPN 1063599) to Abdulrahman Awlaki (TPN 26350617), the American son of Anwar al Awlaki, anyone who has ever been the target of a covert operation was first assigned a TPN and closely monitored by all agencies who follow that TPN long before they were eventually put on a separate list and extrajudicially sentenced to death,\u201d Hale wrote.<\/p>\n

He also exposed that the more than one million entries in the TIDE database includes about 21,000 United States citizens.<\/p>\n

After leaving the Air Force in July 2013, Hale was employed by the private defense contractor National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as a political geography analyst between December 2013 and August 2014. He said he took the job, which paid $80,000 a year, because he was in desperate need of money and hoped to go to college. But by then he was disgusted with the drone program and determined to make the public aware of its abuses and lawlessness. Inspired by the peace activist David Dellinger, he, like Dellinger, had decided to become a traitor to \u201cthe American way of death.\u201d He would make amends for his complicity in the killings, even at the cost of his own security and freedom.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the president gets up in front of the nation and says they are doing everything they can to ensure there is near certainty there will be no civilians killed, he is saying that because he can\u2019t say otherwise, because anytime an action is taken to finish a target there is a certain amount of guesswork in that action,\u201d Hale says in the film. \u201cIt\u2019s only in the aftermath of any kind of ordinance being dropped that you know how much actual damage was done. Oftentimes, the intelligence community is reliant, the Joint Special Operations Command, the CIA included, is reliant on intelligence coming afterwards that confirms that who they were targeting was killed in the strike, or that they weren\u2019t killed in that strike.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people who defend drones, and the way they are used, say they protect American lives by not putting them in harm\u2019s way,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat they really do is embolden decision makers, because there is no threat, there is no immediate consequence. They can do this strike. They can potentially kill this person they are so desperate to eliminate because of how potentially dangerous they could be to the US. But if it just so happens that they don\u2019t kill that person, or some other people involved in the strike get killed as well, there are no consequences for it. When it comes to high-value targets, every mission you go after one person at a time, but anybody else killed in that strike is blanketly assumed to be an associate of the targeted individual. So as long as they can reasonably identify that all of the people in the field view of the camera are military-aged males, meaning anybody who is believed to be age 16 or older, they are a legitimate target under the rules of engagement. If that strike occurs and kills all of them, they just say they got them all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drones, he warns, make remote killing \u201ctoo easy, too convenient.\u201d<\/p>\n

On August 8, 2014, the FBI raided his home. It was his last day of work for the private contractor. A male and female FBI agent shoved their badges in his face when he opened the door.<\/p>\n

\u201cImmediately behind them came about 20 agents, basically all of them with pistols drawn, some wearing body armor,\u201d he says in the film. \u201cAt this point I was extremely scared. I did not understand what was going on. Altogether, there might have been at least 30 to 50 agents in and out of the house at different points throughout the evening taking photos of every room and everything, searching for different things.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time they finished his house was stripped of all electronics, including his cell phone.<\/p>\n

For the next five years he lived with the uncertainty of his fate. He struggled to find work, fought off depression and contemplated suicide. He was barred, by law, from speaking about his plight, even with a therapist. In 2019, the Trump administration indicted Hale on four counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of theft of government property.<\/p>\n

The thousands of targeted assassinations carried out by drones, often in countries that are not at war with the United States, are an egregious violation of international law. They are turning huge swathos of the planet against us. The secret kill lists, which include US citizens, have transformed the executive branch into judge, jury and executioner, obliterating the right to due process. Those that commit these killings are unaccountable. Hale sacrificed his career and his freedom to warn us. He is not a danger to the country. The danger we face comes from the secret drone program, which is spiraling out of control and ominously being adopted by domestic law enforcement agencies. If left unchecked, the terror we impose on others we will soon impose on ourselves.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. Until this month, he wrote a weekly column for the online magazine\u00a0<\/em>Truthdig. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

12 Jul 2021 – Daniel Hale exposed the widespread and indiscriminate murder of noncombatants in the global US drone war. For his heroism, he faces ten years in prison while those who oversee these war crimes continue their killing spree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":180419,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1106,112,95,921],"class_list":["post-188864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-drones","tag-pentagon","tag-us-military","tag-whistleblowing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}