Night fell when the missiles that killed Salim Bin Ahmed Ali Jaber, and Walid Bin Ali Jaber were launched. Salim, a respected imam from Khashamir in southeastern Yemen who had made a name of himself denouncing Al Qaedas growing power in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed by missiles. His cousin Walid was an officer in the local police force. The Hellfires struck on August 21, 2012. They were confronted by three suspected militants in a palm grove. Protests erupted in the days following the deaths of the men, which was a symbol for many Yemenis of the human cost of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in their country. Daniel Hale was a young intelligence specialist in U.S. Air Force. He watched the missiles land thousands of miles away at Bagram, Afghanistan's U.S. military base. Hale was seated on a Washington, D.C. panel listening to Faisal bin Al Ali Jaber, Salim's brother, recount the day Salim died. Fazil was recounting the next events and I felt transported back to 2012, when I was there. Fazil and his village knew that Salem was not the only one watching. Everyone on duty and I paused our work to watch the devastation unfold from Afghanistan. Two Hellfire missiles, one after the other, soared out of the sky at the touch of a button. I and others around me cheered and clapped with triumph, showing no sign of regret. Fazil wept in front of an inebriated audience. In an 11-page handwritten letter, Hale recalled this emotional moment as well as others arising from his work on top-secret drone programs for the U.S. government. This letter was filed at the U.S. District Court Eastern District of Virginia this week.Screenshot from Daniel Hales 11-page handwritten note, dated July 18, 2021Secret Evidence Hale was indicted in March 2019 by a grand jury and taken into custody on several counts related to the unauthorized publication of intelligence and national defense information, and the theft or government property. The 33-year old pleaded guilty in March to leaking unclassified, top-secret and secret documents to a news agency. Government filings strongly suggested that the alleged victim was The Intercept. His sentencing will take place next week. According to Betsy Reed, Intercept editor-in-chief of the Intercept, the Intercept doesn't comment on the identity of anonymous sources. Reed pointed out that these documents revealed a secret and unaccountable method of targeting and killing people all over the globe, including U.S. citizens. Reed noted that these documents are vitally important and warrant a maximum sentence of up to 11 years imprisonment. They claim that Hale showed insufficient remorse, that he was motivated by vanity, not in the public's interest, and that he helped the United States enemies overseas, the Islamic State. The government claimed that these documents contained details that could be used by adversaries to stop or defeat U.S. military operations and the U.S. intelligence agency. They were indeed of sufficient interest for ISIS to distribute two more documents as a guidebook to its followers.However, Hales sentencing was done in an unusual manner by the probation officer, who makes recommendations for the court, and has not seen key facts. The government claims that Hales disclosures could cause grave or extremely grave harm to U.S. security. The Intercept has not seen the documents at issue, which are kept secret and protected from public scrutiny. Harry P. Cooper, a former CIA senior official and well-known agency expert on classified material, made a declaration in Hales' case about the national security risk posed by the publication of the documents. Cooper, who holds a top-secret clearance, has trained top-level officers at the agency including the director of CIA. Cooper stated that although some documents were classified as national defense information, they did not pose a significant risk to the United States. He also provided a declaration in Hales case on the potential national security threat posed by the release of the documents. This law prohibits the accused from informing the public to defend against imprisonment. However, Hales' personal motivations and character were repeatedly mentioned in a sentencing memo. Prosecutors argued that Hales was obsessed with journalists, which led to top-secret U.S. documents being obtained by the most vicious terrorists around the globe. The lawyers for Hales argued in their own motion that the motivations of the former intelligence analysts were obvious, even though the government did not recognize them. They wrote that the facts about Mr. Hales' motive are clear. He committed the crime to draw attention to the immoral government conduct he believed was committed under the cover of secrecy, contrary to the public statements made by then-President Obama about the alleged precision in the United States military's drone program.Hidden Assassinations Experts who focused on the drone program strongly disagree with the prosecution's claim that Hales disclosures didn't provide a significant public benefit. Experts agree that shedding light on the lethal program, which the government has tried to hide from the public eye for years, is crucial. According to Priyanka Mtaparthy, the director of Columbia Law School's Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights Project, the disclosures gave the American public important information about a deadly program. These disclosures helped to reveal that some of the worst effects of the program, including the civilian toll, had been hidden and buried. These groups have compiled staggering numbers over the years. TBIJ, a U.K.-based Bureau of Investigation Journalism estimates that drones and other covert killings in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen have resulted in between 8,858 to 16,901 deaths since 2004. As many as 2,200 of those who were killed are civilians. This includes several hundred children and multiple U.S. citizen, including a boy aged 16. As Hales' letter to the court this week, and the documents he allegedly made publicly public, show, civilian casualties in drone wars are a small fraction of the real cost. Unless proven otherwise enemies killed in action are the most common classification for people killed in drone strikes in America. After years of pressure, and following the publication of the materials Hale is accused in leaking, the Obama administration established new reporting requirements in 2016 for civilian casualties in covert counterterrorism operations. This required that 64 to 116 civilians had been killed in drone strikes or other lethal operations. The Trump administration, however, rescinded this meager disclosure requirement, thereby allowing the public to remain in the dark about the identities of those who are being killed.War for Profit According to the government, Hales' principal interest was self-aggrandizement and reckless self-promotion. In its sentencing memo, the prosecution stated that Hales vanity overrode his commitments to his country. However, the letter Hale sent to the court shows a very different picture of a young man who was traumatized by his involvement in the nation's longest war. Hale vividly describes his depression and post-traumatic stress disorder struggles. He also describes how he felt compelled to share classified information with journalists out of a sense of obligation. In his July 18 letter to OGrady Hale stated that he was influenced by the time I spent in the United States Air Force. In his July 18 letter to OGrady, Hale wrote that he had witnessed the first drone strike. This was days after he deployed to Afghanistan. The operation targeted a group of armed men who were brewing tea in a campfire at the mountain tops of Paktika province. It was carried out before sunrise. They were not considered unusual in my hometown, nor would they have carried weapons within the tribal territories that are virtually ungoverned by Afghan authorities. The only difference was that one of them was a Taliban suspect, who was given away by the targeted cellphone in his pocket. The remaining individuals were armed and of military age. They also sat in the presence an alleged enemy combatant, which was sufficient evidence to suspect them. The fate of these tea-loving men was sealed even though they had peacefully assembled and posed no threat. As I watched from a computer monitor, I was unable to see the scene as a terrifying flurry Hellfire missiles crashed down on the mountainside. I still recall many scenes of graphic violence that were committed from the comfort of my computer chair. Every day I question my actions, not one. It may have been allowed for me to help kill men whose languages I didn't understand or customs I didn't understand. I might not have been able to identify the crimes that I committed in the horrifying way I did. Let them die. How could I consider it honorable to continue to wait for the next chance to kill unsuspecting people, who more often than not are in no danger to me or anyone else at the time? It is not only honorable but it is also absurd that anyone could believe it was necessary to protect the United States and kill people in Afghanistan, none of whom were responsible for the September 11th attacks against our nation. In 2012, one year after Osama Bin Laden's death in Pakistan, the United States was still in Afghanistan. I was part in the murder of misguided young men, who were just children on 9/11. Hale said that he didn't lose his mind and carried on his work of identifying drone targets. The profit motives in the war against terror became more apparent as the years went by. This fact was evident all around me. Contract mercenaries outnumbered uniform-wearing soldiers by 2 to 1. They earned up to 10 times their salaries in the longest and most technologically advanced war American history. It didn't matter if it was, like I had seen it, an Afghan farmer who was blown in half and was still conscious, trying to get his insides off of the ground. Or if it was an American flag-draped coffin that was lowered into Arlington National Cemetery to the sound a 21-gun salute. Bang. Bang. Bang. Both helped to justify capital flow at the expense of blood ours and theirs. This makes me feel terribly guilty for supporting it and I'm a bit grief-stricken. Hale told the court about the most difficult day of his deployment. It was when a routine surveillance mission turned to disaster. The Americans had been following a group car bomb manufacturer based in Jalalabad. Hale recalls that one of the suspects was heading east at an extremely high speed on a cloudy afternoon. His supervisors thought that the driver might have been running for the Pakistan border. Hale said that the drone strike was our only hope and it had already begun lining up for the shot. The missile missed its target by just a few meters due to the wind and clouds. The vehicle continued to move for some time before finally coming to a halt. Hale described witnessing a man get out of his car and check himself, as though he couldn't believe he was still alive. Hales was stunned when a woman walked towards the trunk. Hale learned later that two children were hiding inside the trunk. They were between the ages of three and five. They were found in a dumpster by a unit of Afghan soldiers the next day. Hale said that the younger of them was still alive, but had been severely dehydrated. Hale recalled that the eldest of the two was found dead from unspecified injuries caused by shrapnel.
