Daniel Hale is een ex-drone piloot van de VS, die een aantal overheidsdocumenten heeft gelekt naar de pers waaruit blijkt dat de VS verschrikkelijke oorlogsmisdaden begaat middels die drones……. Eerder was Hale één van de weinige militairen die het aandurfden om te protesteren tegen de gevangenneming van destijds nog Bradley Manning, nu bekend als vrouw onder de voornaam Chelsea. Hij heeft zich met anderen zelfs verweerd tegen de poging van burgemeester Michael Bloomberg van New York om een kampement van Occupy in Zuccotti Park te vegen, voor zijn steun aan Manning had Hale een week vrij genomen van zijn  werk. De poging van Bloomberg mislukte toen de duizenden demonstranten, waaronder georganiseerde transportmedewerkers (transit workers dat overigens op meerdere manieren kan worden vertaald, bijvoorbeeld ook als wegwerkers), onderwijzers, vakbondsleden van de Teamster vakbond en communicatie medewerkers, die zich rond het park opstelden, met hun leuzen de politie terugdrongen (hoe kan je iets dergelijks beter doen??).

           Daniel Hale: foto overgenomen van Intelligencer  Photo: Courtesy of Bob Hayes

Uit de documenten die Hale heeft gelekt blijkt dat het doel van drone aanvallen terreurverdachten zijn, echter zoals hier al vaak opgemerkt gaat het bij 90% van de slachtoffers niet eens om verdachten, veelal vrouwen en kinderen, waarbij de VS loog dat het om terreurverdachten ging…… (overigens is het vermoorden van verdachten uiteraard een enorme oorlogsmisdaad) De VS draait zelfs de hand niet om om eigen burgers in het buitenland te vermoorden zoals de 16 jarige Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki die in Jemen werd vermoord middels een drone, hij was de zoon van Anwar al-Awlaki, een radicale geestelijke, die een week voor zijn zoon op dezelfde manier werd vermoord…. De Obama administratie loog destijds dat Al Qaida leider voor het arabische schiereiland, Ibrahim al-Banna, het doel was en dat hij zich ophield met de 16 jarige Anwar en diens neef (die ook omkwam bij deze terreurdaad…)….. 

Het vermoorden van deze ‘onschuldigen’ (dat is een verdachte ook tot het tegendeel is bewezen voor een rechtbank) kwam in de openbaarheid, maar er zijn duizenden meer van dergelijke gevallen, die alleen bekend zijn bij ingewijden die een hoogste veiligheidsmachtiging hebben, zoals Hale destijds…… Ofwel dergelijke zware oorlogsmisdaden en in feite misdaden tegen de menselijkheid werden tot staatsgeheim verklaard…….

Over oorlogsmisdaden gesproken, de VS laat ook verdachten vermoorden in landen waartegen het niet eens oorlog voert, zo bleek eens te meer uit de documenten die Hale lekte….

Hale wordt aangeklaagd inzake de Espionage Act, een wet uit 2017 die het strafbaar stelt als staatsgeheimen aan een vijandige staat van de VS worden geleverd, echter deze wet is niet van toepassing op het openbaren van staatsgeheimen aan de eigen bevolking zoals Hale en bijvoorbeeld Edward Snowden en Chelsea Manning hebben gedaan….. Bovendien is deze wet niet bedoeld klokkenluiders te vervolgen maar spionnen….. Middels het meer dan achterlijke plea bargain heeft Hale toegegeven een aantal documenten te hebben gelekt naar een journalist, daarmee zou hij kunnen worden veroordeeld tot 10 jaar gevangenisstraf, als hij had gepleit onschuldig te zijn zou hem een veel langere gevangenisstraf wachten…… (alleen daarom al zou Nederland nooit meer iemand mogen uitleveren aan de VS, een land dat overduidelijk geen rechtsstaat meer is….)

Chris Hedges heeft een artikel geschreven over Hale dat ik overnam van Information Clearing House (ICH), eerder gepubliceerd op Scheerpost, daaronder nog een link naar een ander artikel over Hale, geschreven door Kerry Howley, gepubliceerd op Intelligencer (onder het ICH artikel kan je klikken voor een ‘Dutch vertaling’ dit neemt wel enkele tientallen seconden tijd in beslag):

Bless our American traitors

By Chris Hedges

Afbeelding overgenomen van Scheerpost

July 20, 2021 “Information
Clearing House” – – “

Scheer Post“ 
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 “Free Bradley
Manning,” 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. 

At the time, Hale was stationed at Fort Bragg. A
few months later he deployed to Afghanistan’s 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.

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 by

The Intercept 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 “enemies killed in action.”

Hale was coerced by Biden’s 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 “retention and transmission of
national security information” 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.

Tragically, his case has not
garnered the attention it should. When Nick Mottern,
of the Ban
Killer Drones campaign, accompanied artists
projecting Hale’s image on downtown walls in
Washington, D.C., he found that everyone he spoke to
was unaware of Hale’s plight. Prominent human rights
organizations, such as the ACLU and PEN, have
largely remained silent and uninvolved. The group

Stand with Daniel Hale 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’s
legal fund. 

“Daniel Hale is one of the most consequential
whistleblowers,” Edward Snowden

said on a May Day panel held at the University
of Massachusetts-Amherst on the fiftieth anniversary
of the release of the Pentagon Papers.  “He
sacrificed everything — an incredibly courageous
person — 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’s voice.”

Speaking on Democracy Now! with host Amy Goodman
a few weeks later,

Daniel Ellsberg agreed that Hale “acted 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.”

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. 

The 2012

“Living Under Drones” report by the Stanford
International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution
Clinic (IHR&CRC) provides a detailed documentation of 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 “an inert
warhead,” The New York Times reported. Instead of
exploding, it hurls about 100 pounds of metal
through a vehicle. The missile’s other feature
includes “six long blades tucked inside,” which
deploy “seconds before impact to slice up anything
in its path” — including, of course, people.

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 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.

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
“fun-sized terrorists.”

“Ever step on ants and never give it another
thought?” Michael Hass, a former drone operator for
the Air Force

told The Guardian.  “That’s what you are made to
think of the targets — 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 — they deserved it, they chose their side. You
had to kill part of your conscience to keep doing
your job every day — and ignore those voices telling
you this wasn’t right.”

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.

“Their presence terrorizes men, women, and
children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological
trauma among civilian communities,” the 2012 report
reads of the drone war in Pakistan. “Those 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.”

Drones have become killing machines that mete out
random death and usually permanently cripple those
victims who survive.

“The 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,” the report
reads.  “Those who do survive drone strikes often
suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb
amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss.”

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.  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 “signature strikes” 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 eight whistleblowers under the
Espionage Act, more than all previous
administrations combined. The Biden administration,
like the Trump and Obama administrations, continues
to launch widespread global drone strikes.

“Before I joined the military, I was well aware
that what I was about to enter was something I was
against, that I disagreed with,” Hale says in the
2016 documentary film

“National Bird.” “I 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.”

In the film, Hale alludes to a difficult and
chaotic childhood.

“It’s kind of funny, a little ironic too, because
so far I’m the only adult male in my entire family,
immediate and external, who had not been to prison
so far,” he says. “I 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’t be carrying a
gun, in the wrong place at the wrong time, a lot of
that where I’m from.”

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’s huge secret
“kill lists.”

“There are several such lists, used to target
individuals for different reasons,” he wrote in an
essay titled “Why I Leaked the Watchlist Documents,”
originally published anonymously in the book “The
Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s
Secret Drone Warfare Program” 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 “The Drone
Papers” published by The Intercept.

“Some lists are closely kept; others span
multiple intelligence and local law enforcement
agencies,” Hale writes in the essay. “There are
lists used to kill or capture supposed ‘high-value
targets,’ and others intended to threaten, coerce,
or simply monitor a person’s 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.” 

The Terrorist Screening Center, he writes, not
only stores names, dates of birth, and other
identifying information of potential targets, but
also stores “medical records, transcripts, and
passport data; license plate numbers, email, and
cell-phone numbers (along with the phone’s
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.”

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.

“From 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,” Hale wrote.

He also exposed that the more than one million
entries in the TIDE database includes about 21,000
United States citizens.

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 “the American way of
death.” He would make amends for his complicity in
the killings, even at the cost of his own security
and freedom. 

“When 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’t
say otherwise, because anytime an action is taken to
finish a target there is a certain amount of
guesswork in that action,” Hale says in the film.
“It’s 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’t killed in that strike.”

“The people who defend drones, and the way they
are used, say they protect American lives by not
putting them in harm’s way,” he says. “What 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’t
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.”

Drones, he warns, make remote killing “too easy,
too convenient.”

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.

“Immediately behind them came about 20 agents,
basically all of them with pistols drawn, some
wearing body armor,” he says in the film. “At 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.”

By the time they finished his house was stripped
of all electronics, including his cell phone.

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. 

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.

Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a
foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle
East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from
more than 50 countries and has worked for The
Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio,
The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for
which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

—————————

Hier de link naar het artikel op Intelligencer: ‘Call Me a Traitor‘

==============================

Zie ook: ‘Vervolging van drone klokkenluider Hale moet worden gestopt‘ (10 februari 2020)

‘De VS heeft de meest agressieve regering‘

‘Het verzwijgen van belangrijk nieuws door de massamedia: het einde van de journalistiek‘ (zie ook de links in dat bericht naar meer artikelen over ‘onafhankelijke journalistiek’)

‘Zaak van VS tegen Assange gestrand op de belangrijkste getuige, westerse media aandacht: nul komma nada‘

‘Julian Assange en het instorten van de rechtsorde door de onterechte vervolging van deze gelauwerde journalist‘

‘VS heeft ook voor eigen burgers een geheime moordlijst, gebaseerd op metadata, aldus voormalig hoofd NSA en CIA‘ (!!!!)

‘‘Klokkenluidersbescherming’ in VS: Obama en Biden lieten journalisten en redacties afluisteren om klokkenluiders te pakken‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht naar meer artikelen over o.a. Julian Assange en de fascistische opperschoft Navalny)

‘Het verschil tussen totalitaire regimes en ‘vrije democratieën’ flinterdun en soms zelfs niet bestaand….‘