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FILE – In this undated file photo provided by the Nashville Police Department is Daniel Everette Hale, who is indicted in federal court in Alexandria, Va. Under the First Spy Act World War. (Nashville Police Department via AP, file)
FILE – In this undated file photo provided by the Nashville Police Department is Daniel Everette Hale, who is indicted in federal court in Alexandria, Va. Under the First Spy Act World War. (Nashville Police Department via AP, file)
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (AP) – A former Air Force intelligence analyst was sentenced to 45 months in prison on Tuesday for leaking top secret information about the US government’s drone strike program to a journalist.
Daniel Hale of Nashville, Tennessee, said he was motivated by guilt when he leaked to an investigative reporter details of a military drone program that he said was indiscriminately killing civilians in Afghanistan far from the battlefield.
In passing sentence, U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady spoke of the need to deter others from disclosing government secrets and told Hale he had other options than sharing classified information with a reporter.
The charge is one of a series of cases the Justice Department has brought in recent years against current and former government officials who have leaked classified secrets to journalists. As with other leaks, Tuesday’s arguments were less about whether Hale had illegally shared information – he openly admitted to having done so. – and even more on the question of whether the action has undermined national security and to what extent its motives must be taken into account.
Prosecutors argued that Hale, who was deployed to Afghanistan in August 2012 and was honorably released less than a year later, abused the trust of the government and knew the documents he shared “risked causing serious, and in some exceptionally serious, damage to the nation. security ”, but disclosed them anyway. Prosecutors say documents leaked by Hale were found in an internet compilation of material designed to help Islamic State fighters avoid detection.
“(A) As a result of Hale’s actions, the world’s most vicious terrorists obtained documents classified by the United States as ‘Secret’ and ‘Top Secret’ – and believed these documents were valuable enough to be released. to their own supporters in their own textbooks, ”prosecutors wrote.
An electromagnetic intelligence analyst, Hale’s job while deployed to Afghanistan was to locate targets for drone strikes and track down cell phone signals linked to people suspected of being enemy combatants.
After leaving the Air Force, Hale – feeling guilty about his role and believing he could make a difference in the way targeted strikes were carried out – shared with a reporter he had previously met with documents which showed the drone program was not as specific as the government claimed in terms of preventing civilian deaths.
He described in an 11-page handwritten letter from prison the horror he said he felt while watching videos of Afghan civilians being killed in part because of the work he had done to help locate them.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t question the rationale for my actions,” Hale wrote.
His lawyers have argued in court documents that his altruistic motives, and the government’s failure to show any real harm as a result of the leaks, should be counted for a light sentence.
“He committed the offense to draw attention to what he believed to be immoral government conduct under cover of secrecy and contrary to public statements by then President Obama regarding the alleged accuracy of the drone program of the US military, ”they wrote.
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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
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