Former U.S. intelligence analyst Daniel Hale has been unexpectedly arrested and jailed ahead of his sentencing, which is scheduled for July 13. In March, Hale pleaded guilty to one count of violating the World War I-era Espionage Act for leaking classified documents about the secretive U.S. drone and targeted assassination programs. On Saturday, Amy Goodman interviewed National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and asked him about Daniel Hale.
Edward Snowden: “Daniel Hale is one of the most consequential whistleblowers. 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% 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.”
Edward Snowden was speaking on a virtual panel with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg that I moderated. Watch the full interview here.