OMNI
NATIONAL WHISTLEBLOWER’S DAY
ANTHOLOGY #12, JULY 30, 2022.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a
Culture of Peace and Justice
(#1
Oct. 21, 2011; #2 Dec. 12, 2011; #3 January 31, 2012; #4 Sept. 12, 2012; $5,
March 29, 2013; #6, May 22, 2013; #7 June 24, 2013; #8 July 30, 2013; #9 July
30, 2014; #10, July 30, 2019; #11, July 30, 2021).
NOTE: FOR EIGHT NUMBERS THIS NEWSLETTER ON WHISTLEBLOWERS and LEAKERS WAS
PUBLISHED PERIODICALLY. Beginning with
#8 IT WAS STILL PUBLISHED OCCASIONALLY BUT ON
(AT PRESENT the PROPOSED) NATIONAL WHISTLEBLOWER’S DAY, JULY 30. SEE EXPLANATION in #9).
OMNI’s
endowed fund at UA’s Mullins Library for the purchase of books and films on
Victims includes whistleblowers and leakers-- true
heroes, real valor.
CONTENTS #12
TIM SCHWARTZ. A PUBLIC SERVICE: Whistleblowing,
Disclosure and Anonymity.
Chris Hedges. The Chris Hedges Report. 7-31-22.
“When The Just Go to Prison.”
Arkansas Supreme Court Follows Bush-Obama-Trump Obeisance to the Espionage Act.
Whistleblower-Leakers Anthologies #11 and #10.
TEXTS #12
TIM SCHWARTZ. A PUBLIC SERVICE: Whistleblowing, Disclosure and Anonymity.
FOR NATIONAL
WHISTLEBLOWER DAY JULY 30, A SUPERB GUIDE
HOW TO
BLOW A WHISTLE
From Daniel Ellsberg to Edward Snowden to Chelsea Manning,
whistleblowers have proven their importance in safeguarding democracy. But can
a whistleblower reveal truths about the government or a corporation without
revealing her identity? Digital security expert Tim Schwartz says she can, and
in this concise, easy-to-understand handbook, shows us how.
“The
must-have handbook” —Katharine
Gun
"Outstanding"
—Cory Doctorow
“A
practical roadmap when making that often life-altering choice of standing up
and exposing abuse..." —Thomas
Drake
Free e-book of In Defense of
Julian Assange with every paperback
|
Chris Hedges. The Chris Hedges Report. 7-31-22.
“When The Just Go to Prison” [I highlighted some of the key topics: Daniel
Hale, whistleblower and leakers, prison, Espionage Act, drones, The Drone
Papers, The Intercept, civilians
killed, Nicholson Baker, supermax prison, conscience, Obama, Bush, Trump,
Assange, Snowden Drake, Manning Sterling, Kiriakou, Schulte, Afghan Bagram Air
Force Base, David Dellinger, Hellfire missiles, Bureau of Investigative
Journalism, Jeremy Scahill’s The
Assassination Complex, Terrorist Identities Data…. –Dick] When
those who expose the crimes of the state are criminalized and sent to prison,
tyranny is inevitable.
MARION, Illinois — Daniel Hale, dressed in a khaki
uniform, his hair cut short and sporting a long, neatly groomed brown beard,
is seated behind a plexiglass screen, speaking into a telephone receiver at
the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. I hold a receiver on the other side
of the plexiglass and listen as he describes his journey from working for the
National Security Agency and the Joint Special Operations Task Force at
Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to becoming federal prisoner 26069-07. Hale, a 34-year-old former
Air Force signals intelligence analyst, is serving a 45
month prison sentence, following his conviction under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified documents about
the U.S. military’s drone assassination program and its high civilian death
toll. The documents are believed to be the source material for “The Drone Papers” published
by The Intercept, on October 15, 2015. These documents revealed
that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations drone
airstrikes killed more than 200 people — of which only 35 were the intended
targets. According to the documents, over one five-month period of the
operation, 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.” You can see my interview
with Hale’s attorney, Jesselyn Radack, here. The terrorizing and widespread killing of
thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of civilians was a potent recruiting
tool for the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents. The aerial attacks created far
more hostile fighters than they eliminated and enraged many in the Muslim
world. Hale is composed, articulate
and physically fit from his self-imposed regime of daily exercise. We discuss
books he has recently read, including John Steinbeck’s novel East of
Eden and Nicholson Baker’s Baseless:
My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act,
which explores whether the U.S. used biological weapons on China and Korea
during World War II and the Korean War. Hale is currently housed in the
Communications Management Unit (CMU), a special unit that severely restricts
and heavily monitors communications, including our conversation, and
visitations. The decision by The
Bureau of Prisons to lock Hale up in the most restrictive wing of a supermax
prison ignores the recommendation of the sentencing Judge Liam O’Grady,
who suggested that he
be placed in a low-security prison hospital facility in Butner, North
Carolina, where he could get treatment for his PTSD. Hale is one of a few dozen people of conscience who have
sacrificed their careers and their freedom to inform the public about
government crimes, fraud and lies. Rather than investigate the crimes that
are exposed and hold those who carried them out to account, the two ruling
parties wage war on all who speak out. These men and women of conscience are the lifeblood of
journalism.
Reporters cannot document abuses of power without them. The silence on the
part of the press over Hale’s imprisonment, as well as the persecution and
imprisonment of other champions of an open society, such as Julian Assange, is
stunningly shortsighted. If our most important public servants, those with
the courage to inform the public, continue to be criminalized at this rate,
we will cement in place total censorship, resulting in a world where the
abuses and crimes of the powerful are shrouded in darkness. Barack Obama weaponized the Espionage Act to
prosecute those who provided classified information to the press. The Obama White House, whose assault on
civil liberties was worse than those of the Bush administration, used the 1917
Act, designed to prosecute spies, against eight people who leaked information
to the media including Assange —
although he is not a U.S. citizen, and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based
publication — along with Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling and John Kiriakou, who
spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of
suspects held in black sites. Also under The Espionage
Act, Joshua Schulte, a
former CIA software engineer, was convicted on
July 13, 2022 of the so-called Vault 7 leak,
published by WikiLeaks in 2017, which revealed how the
CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones and turned internet-connected
televisions into listening devices. He faces up to 80 years in prison. Obama used the Espionage
Act against those who provided information to the media more than all
previous administrations combined. He set a terrifying legal precedent,
equating informing the public with spying for a hostile power. I
published classified material when
I was a reporter at The New York Times, but we are fast
approaching the day when the mere possession of such material, along with its
publication, will be illegal, as is already law in
the U.K. It is a short step from criminalizing journalism to the imprisonment
and murder of reporters, such as Jamal Khashoggi in
the Saudi consulate in 2018 in Istanbul. While Assange was sheltering in the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London, the CIA discussed kidnapping and assassinating him following
the release of the Vault 7 documents. The Espionage Act has been abused in the past. President Woodrow
Wilson used it to throw socialists, including Eugene V. Debs, in
prison for opposing America’s participation in World War I. But not until the
Obama administration was it
systematically turned on the press. Wholesale government
surveillance, about which many charged under the Espionage Act tried to warn
the public, includes surveillance of journalists. The
surveillance of the press, along with those who attempt to inform the public
by providing information to reporters, has largely shut down investigations
into the machinery of power. The price of telling the truth is too costly. Hale, trained in the army as
a Mandarin linguist, was uneasy the moment he began working in the secretive
drone program. “I needed a paycheck,” he
says of his work in the Air Force and later as a private contractor in the
drone program, “I was homeless. I had nowhere else to go. But I knew it was
wrong.” While stationed at Fort
Bragg, North Carolina, he took a week off in October 2011 to camp out in New
York’s Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement. He wore his
uniform — a gutsy act of open defiance for someone on active duty— and held
up a sign that read, “Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet announced her
transition. “I slept in the park,” he
says. “I was there the morning [Mayor] Bloomberg and his girlfriend made
the first attempt to clear the occupiers. I stood with thousands of
protestors, including Teamsters and communications workers, who ringed the
park. The police backed down. I learned later that while I was in the park,
Obama ordered a drone strike in Yemen that killed Abdulrahman
Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the radicalized cleric Anwar
al-Awlaki, killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier.” Hale was deployed a few
months later to Afghanistan’s Bagram
Air Force Base. He described his work
in a letter to the
judge: In my capacity as a signals intelligence analyst stationed at Bagram
Airbase, I was made to track down the geographic location of handset cell
phone devices believed to be in the possession of so-called enemy combatants.
To accomplish this mission required access to a complex chain of
globe-spanning satellites capable of maintaining an unbroken connection with
remotely piloted aircraft, commonly referred to as drones. Once a steady
connection is made and a targeted cell phone device is acquired, an imagery
analyst in the U.S., in coordination with a drone pilot and camera operator,
would take over using information I provided to surveil everything that
occurred within the drone’s field of vision. This was done, most often, to
document the day-to-day lives of suspected militants. Sometimes, under the
right conditions, an attempt at capture would be made. Other times, a
decision to strike and kill them where they stood would be weighed. The first time that I witnessed a drone strike came within
days of my arrival to Afghanistan. Early that morning, before dawn, a group
of men had gathered together in the mountain ranges of Patika province around
a campfire carrying weapons and brewing tea. That they carried weapons with
them would not have been considered out of the ordinary in the place I grew
up, much less within the virtually lawless tribal territories outside the
control of the Afghan authorities. Except that among them was a suspected
member of the Taliban, given away by the targeted cell phone device in his
pocket. As for the remaining individuals, to be armed, of military age, and
sitting in the presence of an alleged enemy combatant was enough evidence to
place them under suspicion as well. Despite having peacefully assembled,
posing no threat, the fate of the now tea drinking men had all but been
fulfilled. I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer
monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of hellfire missiles came crashing
down, splattering purple-colored crystal guts on the side of the morning
mountain. Since that time and to this
day, I continue to recall several such scenes of graphic violence carried out
from the cold comfort of a computer chair. Not a day goes by that I don’t
question the justification for my actions. By the rules of engagement, it may
have been permissible for me to have helped to kill those men — whose
language I did not speak, whose customs I did not understand, and whose
crimes I could not identify — in the gruesome manner that I did. Watch them
die. But how could it be considered honorable of me to continuously have laid
in wait for the next opportunity to kill unsuspecting persons, who, more
often than not, are posing no danger to me or any other person at the time.
Nevermind honorable, how could it be that any thinking person continued to
believe that it was necessary for the protection of the United States of
America to be in Afghanistan and killing people, not one of whom present was
responsible for the September 11th attacks on our nation. Notwithstanding, in
2012, a full year after the demise of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was a
part of killing misguided young men who were but mere children on the day of
9/11. Hale drifted after leaving
the Air Force, dropped out of the New School where he had been attending
college, and was lured back into operating drones in 2013 by the private
defense contractor National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency where he worked as a political geography analyst
between December 2013 and August 2014. “I was making $ 80,000 a
year,” he says into the receiver. “I had friends with college degrees who
could not make that kind of money.” Inspired by peace activist David Dellinger, Hale 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 freedom. He leaked 17
classified documents that exposed the high number of civilian deaths from drone strikes. He became an outspoken and
prominent critic of the drone program. Because Hale was charged
under the Espionage Act, he
was not permitted to explain his motivations to the court. He was also
forbidden from providing evidence to the court that the drone assassination
program killed and wounded large numbers of noncombatants, including
children. “Evidence of the defendant’s
views of military and intelligence procedures would needlessly distract the
jury from the question of whether he had illegally retained and transmitted
classified documents, and instead convert the trail into an inquest of U.S.
military and intelligence procedures,” government attorneys said in a motion
at Hale’s trial. “The defendant may wish for
his criminal trial to become a forum on something other than his guilt, but
those debates cannot and do not inform the core questions in this case: whether
the defendant illegally retained and transferred the documents he stole,” the
government motion continued. Drones often fire Hellfire missiles equipped with an
explosive warhead weighing about 20 pounds. A Hellfire variant, known as
the R9X, carries an inert
warhead. 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, shredding anything in front of it —
including people. Drones hover 24 hours a day in the skies over countries including Iraq,
Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria and, before
our defeat, Afghanistan. Operated remotely from
Air Force bases as far away from the target sites as Nevada, drones fire
ordinance that instantly and without warning obliterates homes and vehicles
or kills clusters of people. Hale found the jocularity of the young drone
operators, who treated the killings as if they were an enhanced video game,
disturbing. Child victims of drone attacks were dismissed as “fun-sized
terrorists.” Those who survive drone
strikes are often badly maimed, losing
limbs, suffering severe burns and shrapnel wounds, and losing their vision
and hearing. In a statement he read at
his sentencing on July 27, 2021, Hale said:“I think of the farmers in their
poppy fields whose daily harvest will gain them safe passage from the
warlords, who will, in turn, trade it for weapons before it is synthesized,
repackaged, and re-sold dozens of times before it finds its way into this
country and into the broken veins of our nation’s next opioid victim. I think
of the women who, despite living their entire lives never once allowed to
make so much as a choice for themselves, are treated as pawns in a ruthless
game politicians play when they need a justification to further the killing
of their sons & husbands. And I think of the children, whose bright-eyed,
dirty faces look to the sky and hope to see clouds of gray, afraid of the
clear blue days that beckon drones to come carrying eager death notes for
their fathers.” “As one drone operator put
it,” he read in court, “‘Do you ever step on ants and never give it another
thought?’ That’s what you’re made to think of the targets. They deserved it,
they chose their side. You had to kill a part of your conscience to keep
doing your job — ignoring the voice inside telling you this wasn’t right. I,
too, ignored the voice inside as I continued walking blindly towards the edge
of an abyss. And when I found myself at the brink, ready to give in, the
voice said to me, ‘You, who had been a hunter of men, are no longer. By the
grace of God you’ve been saved. Now go forth and be a fisher of men so that
others might know the truth.’” It was, ironically, the
election of Obama that encouraged
Hale to join the Air Force. “I thought Obama, who as a
candidate opposed the war in Iraq, would end the wars and lawlessness of the Bush administration,” he says. However, a few weeks after
he took office, Obama 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 563 drone strikes that killed approximately
3,797 people, many of whom were civilians. Obama authorized “signature strikes”
allowing the CIA to carry out drone attacks against groups of suspected
militants without getting positive identification. His administration
approved “follow-up” or
“double-tap” drone strikes, which deployed drones to strike anyone e who
assisted those injured in the initial drone strike. The Bureau of Investigative Journalists reported in
2012 that “at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they
had gone to help victims,” during Obama’s
first three years in office. Additionally, “more than 20 civilians have also
been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners” the report
read. Obama expanded the footprint of the drone program in Pakistan, Somalia
and Yemen, and established drone bases in Saudi Arabia and Turkey. “There are several such
lists, used to target individuals for different reasons,” Hale writes in an
essay titled, “Why I Leaked the Watchlist Documents,” originally published
anonymously in May 2016 in the book The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone
Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of 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 (TIDE), and 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.” Suspects’ data is
collected and pooled by the intelligence alliance formed by Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, known as the Five Eyes.
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. As Hale exposed in the
leaked documents, the more than one million entries in the TIDE database
include about 21,000 U.S. citizens. “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 award-winning documentary “National Bird,” a film
about whistleblowers in the U.S. drone program who suffered moral injury
and PTSD. “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 in the film. “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 U.S. 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, [in] every
mission you go after one person at a time, but anybody else killed in that
strike is blankly 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 says, make remote killing “easy and convenient.” On August 8, 2014, the FBI raided Hale’s home. It
was his last day of work for the private contractor. Two FBI agents, one male
and one female, shoved their badges in his face when he opened the door.
About two dozen agents, pistols drawn, many wearing body armor, followed
behind. They photographed and ransacked every room. They confiscated all his
electronics, including his phone. He spent the next five years
in limbo. He struggled to find work, fought off depression and contemplated
suicide. In 2019, the Trump
administration indicted Hale on
four counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of theft of
government property. As part of a plea deal, he pled guilty to one count of
violating the Espionage Act. “I am here to answer for my
own crimes and not that of another person,” he said at his sentencing. “And
it would appear that I am here today to answer for the crime of stealing
papers, for which I expect to spend some portion of my life in prison. But
what I am really here for is having stolen something that was never mine to
take: precious human life. For which I was well-compensated and given a medal.
I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretended things weren’t
happening that were. My consequential decision to share classified
information about the drone program with the public was a gesture not taken
lightly, nor one I would have taken at all if I believed such a decision had
the possibility of harming anyone but myself. I acted not for the sake of
self-aggrandizement but that I might some day humbly ask forgiveness.” I know a few Daniel Hales. They made my most important
reporting possible. They enabled truths to be told. They held the powerful
accountable. They gave a voice to the victims. They informed the public. They
called for the rule of law. I sit across from Hale and
wonder if this is the end, if he, and others like him, will be completely
silenced. Hale’s imprisonment is a
microcosm of the vast gulag being constructed for all of us. The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To
receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid
subscriber. Hedges is a great public intellectual, conscience, and
truth-teller. --Dick From his publisher: Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning
journalist who was a foreign correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle
East and the Balkans for fifteen years for The New York Times. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is host of the Emmy Award–nominated
RT America show On Contact. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity
from Harvard University, is the author of numerous books, and was a National
Book Critics Circle finalist for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He has taught at Columbia University, New York
University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. |
And the Arkansas Supreme Court shares the Bush, Obama, Trump repression
of our Bravehearts:
Supreme
Court deals another blow to whistleblower act ...
https://arktimes.com
› Arkansas Blog
May 30, 2019 - The Arkansas Supreme
Court today dismissed a complaint by a former ... of that protection in
the whistleblower law was unconstitutional.
State
Supreme Court does away with state Whistle-Blower Act ...
https://arktimes.com
› Arkansas Blog
Apr 12, 2018 - In a 5-2
decision today, the Arkansas Supreme Court
neutered the ... In January, the Supreme Court ruled that the legislature could
not pass laws waiving .... try to amend the Constitution to add
the WhistleBlowers protections.
Arkansas
Law Targets Workplace Whistleblowers
https://www.courthousenews.com
› arkansas-law-targets-workplace-whistle...
Mar 24, 2017 - LITTLE
ROCK, Ark. (CN) – The governor of Arkansas signed
a law Thursday that gives employers the authority to sue whistleblowers who ...
Act. For more ... manpower or a
violation of law; participates, or gives information, in an.
355.1
Whistleblower Policy - University of Arkansas System
https://www.uasys.edu
› board-policy
Oct 13, 2017 - The
University is committed to compliance with the laws and
... are in violation of law as
defined in Arkansas and federal whistleblower
laws. III.
CONTENTS #11
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/07/omni-national-whistleblowers-day.html
Chris Hedges, Essays on Daniel Hale, “The Price of Conscience” and “Bless
the Traitors”
Radio Panel, Julian Assange
Mark Hertsgaard, Bravehearts:
Whistle-Blowers in the Age of Snowden
Arkansas Whistle-Blower Law
CONTENTS
OF #10, July 30, 2019
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2019/08/whistleblowerleakers-day-newsletter-10.html
HELP WHISTLEBLOWERS
Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou—Roots Action
Jeffrey Sterling—Roots Action
Daniel Hale—The Intercept, Truthout
END
NATIONAL WHISTLEBLOWER’S DAY
ANTHOLOGY
#12, JULY 30, 2022
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