03 August 21
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Hale should be pardoned and released, and the government should pay him restitution.
ince the arrest and indictment of Daniel Hale on charges that he leaked the documents that formed the basis for The Intercept’s series “The Drone Papers,” as well as documents about the government’s secret watchlisting system, I have wanted to speak publicly about this unjust prosecution. However, due to security concerns, legal advice, and a desire not to hinder, in any way, Hale’s defense or to aid the government in its disgraceful prosecution, I have been unable to do so. Now that the circumstances have changed, I am able to share some aspects of my thoughts. In doing so, I am speaking only for myself and not for The Intercept or anyone else.
Daniel Hale is a man of tremendous conscience, courage, and moral clarity. It is an abomination that this brave whistleblower has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison after being convicted of exposing the horrors of the U.S. drone assassination programs, the killing of civilians, and the Kafkaesque “terror” watchlisting system run by the government.
President Barack Obama’s Justice Department did not prosecute Hale, but the Trump administration dug up the case and threw the book at Hale in an obvious ploy to stanch leaks about President Donald Trump and his corrupt administration. The indictment Trump’s prosecutors crafted was a dishonest piece of political propaganda intended to criminalize Hale and attack the freedom of the press.
The initial threat of decades in prison against Hale was a cudgel deployed by prosecutors in an effort to break Hale’s spirit and to frighten other prospective whistleblowers. That President Joe Biden’s Justice Department continued this prosecution instead of dropping the Trump administration’s case serves as an ominous reminder that the war on whistleblowers is a permanent fixture of the U.S. system. The use of the Espionage Act by successive administrations to prosecute whistleblowers is an affront to basic liberties and the constitutional rights of the accused, as it prevents people of conscience from presenting a real defense before a judge or jury. Its use to target dissent, independent journalism, and whistleblowing is an authoritarian weapon masquerading as a law, and it should be abolished.
In 2013, Daniel Hale and I were separately invited to speak at a public forum alongside a Yemeni American activist in Washington, D.C., about drone strikes and the murderous U.S. war in Yemen. As I listened to Hale speak that day, he struck me as a deeply moral person who was profoundly grappling with the role he had played in a lethal global system of assassination. I found him to be a thoughtful, sincere, caring person with an inherent degree of selflessness and honesty rare in our society. Hale appeared to be viscerally struggling with the nature of the work that he had done on behalf of the U.S. government and the horrors he had witnessed.
The Trump Justice Department indictment against Hale was anemic in its “evidence” and replete with innuendo and circumstantial events dishonestly crafted and presented as a substitute for facts. The government spied on Hale and manipulated his communications to paint a grossly distorted picture of his character and motivations that served the prosecutors’ campaign to railroad him.
It has been particularly disheartening to see people purporting to support Hale repeating Trump Justice Department assertions as established fact. There have been a lot of lies told about what happened in this case — in the Trump Justice Department indictment, by the prosecutors, on social media, and, unfortunately, in some news reports. Contrary to what the judge and prosecutors in this case stated and implied, it is evident that Hale was not motivated by trying to impress a journalist or anyone else. Hale was motivated by love of his fellow humans and by a deep and abiding sense of duty — duty to protect the innocent and the defenseless, as well as dedication to a sense of morality none of his detractors come close to matching. He is a noble teller of truths in a time of systemic deceit and lethal secrecy.
Among the “crimes” that Hale was convicted of are the following: revealing that, at times, nearly nine out of 10 people killed in so-called targeted strikes by the U.S. are not the intended targets; exposing the complicity of top U.S. government officials in a secret kill chain that decides who should be assassinated by drone strike; exposing that the U.S. government officially labels unknown people it kills as “enemies killed in action” unless they are posthumously proven to have been civilians; and exposing the secret watchlisting rulebook used to label people, including U.S. citizens, as “known or suspected terrorists” without evidence that they did anything wrong.
Daniel Hale should be pardoned and released, and the government should pay him restitution for the trauma it has inflicted on him for daring to speak out, at great personal risk, for the victims of wars and extrajudicial assassinations funded by U.S. taxpayers. He deserves the gratitude of good people everywhere for his courage, bravery, and sacrifice. It is a grave injustice that a man who blew the whistle on the killing of civilians is in jail and that those who murder them receive medals or appear as pundits on cable news.
In addition to concerns about COVID safety, workers at Amazon have expressed frustration about impossibly high productivity expectations and are therefore starting to unionize. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
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Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
lected leaders in Arizona’s largest county responded defiantly Monday to a new subpoena issued by the state Senate that sought local computer routers and internal logs to bolster a GOP-commissioned review of the 2020 presidential election results.
Senate President Karen Fann (R) has said the items are needed to conclude the controversial audit of the election in Maricopa County, which private contractors have been conducting on behalf of the Senate since April.
County officials rejected her claim in a scathing letter.
“It is now August of 2021. The election of November 2020 is over. If you haven’t figured out that the election in Maricopa County was free, fair, and accurate yet, I’m not sure you ever will,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers (R) wrote in a letter to the Senate on Monday.
He added: “The Board has real work to do and little time to entertain this adventure in never-never land. Please finish whatever it is that you are doing and release whatever it is you are going to release.”
Earlier this year, the Senate used a subpoena to obtain the county’s nearly 2.1 million ballots and tabulating machines, and handed them over to a private company whose chief executive has echoed false claims that the election was stolen.
Fann has said the audit is intended to help improve the state’s election laws, but former president Donald Trump has suggested it could lead to the decertification of President Biden’s victory in the swing state. The ballot review has been largely financed by private groups touting Trump’s false claims that fraud tainted the outcome.
The Republican-led Maricopa County Board of Supervisors has said that the routers are used for county services other than elections, including the sheriff’s department, and that giving them to a private company could compromise security. What’s more, they said they are reluctant to assist an audit that they believe has been run ineptly and is undermining faith in democracy.
In his letter Monday, Sellers told the Senate that there was no “injection of ballots from Asia” nor “a satellite that beamed votes into our election equipment” — both unsubstantiated allegations advanced by Trump supporters.
“It’s time for all elected officials to tell the truth and stop encouraging conspiracies,” he added.
Sellers’s terse missive was accompanied by a separate five-page letter from a county lawyer, which raised various legal and practical objections to the subpoena.
Separately, a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems, whose election equipment is used in Maricopa, wrote to the Arizona Senate and raised legal objections to a subpoena it received last month seeking administrative passwords to the county’s voting software.
Both the county and Dominion argued that some of the Senate’s requests are now moot because the Senate’s contractor, a Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas, concluded its review of the ballots last week and returned them to Maricopa’s custody.
In a statement, Fann noted that the county response indicated that some of what had been requested would be provided, including through a public information request the Senate had previously filed. “That is progress, and the final audit report will be better because of it,” she said.
As for other items, including the routers, she said the Senate was weighing its options, adding that it was “unfortunate” that the county and Dominion were resisting the subpoenas, saying their posture “breeds distrust.”
“We remain committed to ensuring election integrity as voter confidence is at the heart of what we set out to achieve in this endeavor,” she said. “Our constituents deserve no less.”
Fann has said that Cyber Ninjas is working on a report of its findings and plans to release it later this month, though she has warned that it will be incomplete if Maricopa does not cooperate and turn over the additional items.
The Senate’s options in the face of the county’s defiance are not clear. Fann could ask the Senate to hold the board in contempt, but she does not appear to have the votes to do so. The GOP holds only a one-vote majority in the state Senate, and a previous contempt vote in February failed after state Sen. Paul Boyer (R) said he was opposed. Since then, Boyer has become only more vocal in his opposition to the audit.
Central American asylum seekers traveling to the U.S. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
he American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is reviving a lawsuit challenging the government's use of a public health authority to quickly expel people crossing the Southern border, preventing them from seeking asylum.
The suit was filed against the Trump administration, and the ACLU agreed to stall it when President Biden was sworn into office.
But the ACLU is now moving forward again, signaling frustration with the new administration's use of Title 42 to block asylum seekers due to COVID-19.
The filing with the U.S. District Court in D.C. said the months of negotiations between the government and a number of outside advocacy groups has “reached an impasse.”
“We gave the Biden administration more than enough time to fix any problems left behind by the Trump administration, but it has left us no choice but to return to court. Families’ lives are at stake,” ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney on the case, said in a release.
The new litigation posture puts increased pressure on the Biden administration to draft a replacement policy.
Biden administration officials have for months defended their use of Title 42, even as the administration has suggested it may lift the policy in phases.
The government exempts children and some families from Title 42 but it is still widely used to expel single adults who seek to cross the border. In June, the Biden administration used Title 42 to expel more than 104,000 migrants at the southern border, more than 55 percent of the nearly 189,000 people who attempted to cross.
“ICE is concerned that the loss of Title 42 could create additional pressure on our immigration system,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting Director Tae Johnson told lawmakers in May, nodding to the ACLU's suit. He called the rule “critical” to maintaining social distance in border facilities.
“I don’t think it’s a situation where it’s going to just be lifted electively. We would be mandated by some sort of court order to lift it,” he added later.
The White House referred The Hill to the Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The White House late last month extended travel restrictions along the U.S.-Mexico border citing the pandemic, another move that would make it difficult to walk back Title 42.
The Department of Homeland Security on Friday also resumed “fast track” flights for “certain families who recently arrived at the southern border, cannot be expelled under Title 42, and do not have a legal basis to stay in the United States.”
ear Majority Leader Schumer, Minority Leader McConnell, Speaker Pelosi, Leader McCarthy, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Sanders, and House Budget Committee Chairman Yarmuth:
Sudanese official has said local authorities in Kassala province have found around 50 bodies, apparently people fleeing the war in neighbouring Ethiopia’s Tigray region, floating in the river between the countries over the past week.
