The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Military Whistleblower Imprisoned

Aug 2, 2021

Air Force veteran Daniel Hale was sentenced July 27 to nearly four years in prison. What was his crime? Did he kill a civilian? Did he enrich himself with government property? No, he was convicted of giving information about assassinations by drone bombings in Afghanistan to a journalist, who used it to make the Intercept documentary The Drone Papers.

Hale was in the Air Force from 2009 to 2013 and spent the last two years at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. He says that in his experience the National Security Agency (NSA) and the military used bad information to decide who to kill by drone bombing, so some innocent civilians were killed. He also came to believe the U.S. actions in Afghanistan don’t serve either the American or the Afghan people.

The judge said he intends his sentence to deter others from doing what Hale did. In other words, from exposing the truth.