Het proces van Julian Assange om te mogen procederen tegen zijn uitlevering aan de VS, een analyse van Chris Hedges

(On the top right hand side of this page you can choose for a translation in the language of your choice in Google Translate)

Hier de analyse die Chris Hedges gaf over het proces van Julian Assange tegen zijn uitlevering en dan met name de mogelijkheid om nog in beroep te mogen gaan. 

Het is alleen al een schande dat dit proces nodig is terwijl het overduidelijk is dat één en ander is gebaseerd op VS leugens..... Dan te weten dat de opperschoft Sunak, de premier van Groot-Brittannië, gisteren het gore lef had om de leiding van de gevangenis waar de fascistische misdadiger Navalny overleed op de sanctielijst te zetten..... Alsof er nog Russen zijn, die als ze geen familie hebben in GB, zin hebben om dat dat land te bezoeken..... En dat op de dag dat de gelauwerde onderzoeksjournalist Julian Assange in het land Van Sunak moest verzoeken om nog eenmaal in beroep te mogen gaan tegen zijn uitlevering aan de grootste terreurentiteit ter wereld, de VS......

Een ander land de les lezen terwijl Sunak, zijn regering en de voorgaande van dezelfde neoliberale Tory Partij verantwoordelijk zijn voor het bijna vijf jaar lang geestelijk en lichamelijk martelen van Julian Assange in de Londense Belmarsh gevangenis.... Vijf jaar lang in isolatiefolter, één van de smerigste vormen van marteling die mensen geestelijk en lichamelijk kapotmaakt en dat voor het doen van zijn werk >> het aanbrengen van zeer ernstige oorlogsmisdaden begaan door het VS terreurleger, gegevens over oorlogsmisdaden die hem werden toevertrouwd door klokkenluiders als Chelsea Manning..... 

Het is in de meeste zogenaamde democratieën zo dat het weet hebben van misdaden je verplicht deze te melden, laat staan als het om ernstige oorlogsmisdaden gaat die een zogenaamde democratie verborgen wil houden.... (wat overigens eens te meer aangeeft dat de VS géén democratie noch een rechtsstaat is, gezien het handelen ten aanzien van Julian is ook GB géén rechtsstaat, al waren deze feiten bij een flink aantal mensen al veel langer bekend)

Hier de analyse van Chris Hedges, eerder gepubliceerd op Substack, waarin ook hij nogmaals aangeeft dat het een grove leugen is dat mensen in gevaar zouden zijn gebracht door de openbaringen van Julian..... Verder spreekt Hedges over de aanklager van de VS, een zionistisch racistische (dus fascist) schoft met de naam Kromberg, die in de VS als openbaar aanklager Palestijnen en bijvoorbeeld klokkenluider Chelsea Manning op uitermate valse wijze heeft vervolgd en achter de tralies heeft weten te krijgen, alles gebaseerd op leugens..... Ook in het proces van Assange tegen zijn uitlevering speelt deze ploert een prominente, zeer valse rol.....

(als je het Engels niet machtig bent, zet dan de tekst om in Nederlands met behulp van Google translate dat je rechts bovenaan deze pagina ziet staan, klik eerst in het menu op 'Engels', waarna je weer kan klikken op die vertaalapp, daarna zie je bovenaan in het menu 'Nederlands' staan >> klik daarop en de hele tekst staat vervolgens in het Nederlands, de vertaling is van een redelijk goede kwaliteit.)

Julian Assange's Grand Inquisitor

The prosecution lawyers in the High Court seeking to ensure Julian’s extradition to the U.S. rely almost exclusively on the judicial opinions of Gordon Kromberg, a highly controversial U.S. attorney.

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LONDON — The prosecution for the U.S., which is seeking to deny Julian Assange’s appeal of an extradition order, begun by the Trump administration and embraced by the Biden administration, grounded its arguments on Wednesday in the dubious affidavits filed by a U.S. federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, Gordon Kromberg.

The charges articulated by Kromberg — often false — to make the case for extradition did not fly with the two High Court judges, Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp, who are overseeing Julian’s final appeal in the British courts.

The prosecuting attorneys, under questioning from the judges, were knocked off balance when challenged about the veracity of several of the claims which Kromberg made in support of the indictment against Julian. This was especially the case when the attorneys argued that the classified documents Julian released in 2010 — known as the Iraq and Afghan war logs — were not redacted. These unredacted documents, they told the court, jeopardized the lives of those named in the documents and caused some to “disappear.” 

As defense lawyers Edward Fitzgerald KC and Mark Summers KC made clear, and the judges seemed to acknowledge, the documents were indeed redacted by Julian as he worked with media partners, such as The Guardian and The New York Times, when WikiLeaks published classified military documents concerning the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, along with U.S. State Department cables. The unredacted versions were first published by the website Cryptome after two reporters from The Guardian published a book with the passcode to the documents, leading to their publication by other online organizations. 

Julian contacted the US government, as Summers told the court, and spoke to them at length, in an attempt to prevent the unredacted cables from being published. In the end, the U.S. state department chose not to act. U.S. officials have sheepishly admitted they have no evidence of anyone named in the documents being harmed. Other allegations  — such as that Julian tried to help Chelsea Manning, who leaked the documents, decode a password hash to access documents or protect her identity, or that he sought to conspire with computer hackers — have also been debunked. 

A report provided to Judge Baraitser by a U.S. military forensic expert found that even if Manning was able to decode the password hash (which neither she nor anyone at WikiLeaks ever did) it would not have provided access to documents, it would not have provided her with anonymity and it would not have given her access to documents which she did not already have. The expert also described that someone with Manning’s technical knowledge, skill and experience, as well as her lawful access to Top Secret materials, would have known this . But these Kromberg-inspired canards are all the U.S. has, so it uses them.

By the end of the day, it seemed likely that, probably by April, since requested written briefs have to be turned into the judges in March, the two judges will permit an appeal on at least a few of the points. This will, conveniently for the Biden administration — which I expect does not want to take on the contentious issue of extraditing Julian while fueling the genocide in Gaza — mean that any extradition would occur after the election.  

The two-day hearing was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel and of many of the rulings of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in 2021. If Julian is denied an appeal he can request the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is possible the British court could order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction or decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.

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The CIA seeks Julian’s imprisonment in the U.S. because of the release of the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed hacking tools that permit the CIA to access our phones, computers and televisions, turning them — even when switched off — into monitoring and recording devices. The formal extradition request does not include charges based on the release of the Vault 7 files, but the U.S. request also only came after the release of the Vault 7 material. The CIA usually gets what it wants. But for the near future I expect Julian to continue to rot in HM Prison Belmarsh, where he has been imprisoned for nearly five years as he deteriorates physically and psychologically. This slow motion execution is intentional. 

It is hard to call any court ruling, other than the dropping of the charges against him, a victory, but the longer he stays out of U.S. hands, the more hope he has of regaining his freedom for carrying out the most important investigative journalism of our generation.    

Prosecution attorney Clair Dobbin KC, her long blonde hair spilling out from under her official curled blonde court wig, clung to the Kromberg affidavit like the holy grail, reading sections of it to the court. 

“It is not part of the ordinary responsibilities of journalists to actively solicit and publish classified information,” she told the court, in one of her most obtuse statements.

The core charges, she said, echoing Kromberg, were “complicity in illegal acts to obtain or receive voluminous databases of classified information;” the attempt to “obtain classified information through computer hacking” and “publishing certain documents that contained the un-redacted names of innocent people who risked their safety and freedom to provide information to the United States and its allies, including local Afghans and Iraqis, journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents from repressive regimes.”

Of course, as Julian’s defense pointed out, many of these people were informants, aiding and abetting U.S. war crimes, but the phrase “war crimes” was never mentioned by the prosecution, magically erased from the case.

The prosecution, relying on Kromberg, insisted Julian was not a journalist, that what he published was “not in the public interest” and that the U.S. was not seeking his extradition on political grounds. They charged that “hostile foreign governments, terrorist groups, and criminal organizations have exploited WikiLeaks disclosures in order to gain intelligence to be used against the United States and to be used against foreign nationals who provided assistance to the United States.” They said that Osama bin Laden had requested the material posted by WikiLeaks and that the Taliban used the documents to identify informants.  

I first encountered Kromberg — a fervent Zionist with ties to Israel’s far-right settler movement in the occupied West Bank — when in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. government began imprisoning leading Palestinian activists as “terrorists” and shutting down Palestinian charities such as The Holy Land Foundation. 

Kromberg served as the Grand Inquisitor in these witch hunts, going after numerous Muslims including Ahmed Abu Ali, as well as my friend, the Palestinian professor and activist Dr. Sami al-Arian.

Al-Arian endured a six-month show trial in Florida – not unlike Julian’s – that saw the government’s case collapse in a mass of contradictions and innuendo. During the trial the government called 80 witnesses and subjected the jury to hundreds of hours of often inane phone transcriptions and recordings, made over a 10-year period, which the jury dismissed as “gossip.” Out of the 94 charges made against the four defendants, there were no convictions. Of the 17 charges against al-Arian — including “conspiracy to murder and maim persons abroad” — the jury acquitted him of eight and was hung on the rest. The jurors disagreed on the remaining charges by a count of 10 to 2, favoring his full acquittal. 

Following the acquittal, the Palestinian professor, under duress, accepted a plea bargain agreement that would spare him a second trial, saying in his agreement that he had helped people associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second largest resistance organization in Gaza and the West Bank, with immigration matters. He was sentenced to 57 months in prison. Al-Arian, while imprisoned, was ordered by Kromberg to testify in the grand jury investigation of the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Virginia. 

When al-Arian’s lawyers asked Kromberg to delay the transfer of the professor to Virginia because of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Kromberg told them “if they can kill each other during Ramadan they can appear before the grand jury.” Kromberg, according to an affidavit signed by al-Arian’s attorney, Jack Fernandez, also said: “I am not going to put off Dr. al-Arian’s grand jury appearance just to assist in what is becoming the Islamization of America.” 

The government wasted $80 million trying to convict Dr. al-Arian, who refused Kromberg’s demand that he testify and was charged with contempt. He was eventually deported and lives in Turkey.

 “In 2017, Kromberg prosecuted the case of a D.C. police officer accused of buying gift cards in support of terrorism, charges that arose from a controversial sting operation,” The Intercept noted. “In court, Kromberg leveled eyebrow-raising allegations that the suspect was both a supporter of the jihadist group Islamic State as well as the World War II-era German Nazi Party on the grounds that he owned historical paraphernalia. Referring to an anonymous online commenter who had called the defendant “Muslim-Nazi scum,” Kromberg argued in court, “Whether or not that’s true, I don’t know the answer to that. But the point is that the Nazi stuff in this case is very much related to the, to the ISIS stuff.”

Kromberg has as deep an animus for Julian — and one suspects journalists — as he does for Muslims.

He raises the possibility, a possibility rather foolishly repeated by the prosecution’s representatives in London, that Julian, as a foreign national, could be denied First Amendment protections if tried in the U.S. This prompted the judges to ask if they had “any evidence that a foreign national is entitled to the same rights [under the First Amendment] as a U.S. citizen,” a question Dobbin, fumbling, was unable to answer.

At the same time, Kromberg has offered numerous assurances, repeated by the prosecution on Wednesday, that Julian will not be subjected to harsh prison conditions. He called the possibility that Julian will be housed in a highly restrictive supermax prison “purely speculative.” 

Kromberg subpoenaed Manning in 2019 to testify before a grand jury in an effort to get her to implicate Julian in “one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion,” a charge which was thoroughly debunked by expert testimony in 2020. Manning appeared before the grand jury but refused to answer questions posed to her. She was held in civil contempt and incarcerated. She was released after the grand jury expired. Kromberg then served her with a second subpoena to appear before another grand jury. Again she refused to testify, leading to another round of incarceration and fines of $500 a day that were raised to $1,000 a day after 60 days of noncompliance. In March of 2020 while being housed in a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia, she was hospitalized after she attempted to commit suicide. 

The effort to force Manning to implicate Assange is central to the U.S. case. If they can convince the court that Julian agreed to assist Manning in cracking a passcode to access a Department of Defense computer connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network, used for classified documents and communications, it would allow the government to charge Julian with an actual crime. 

The fatal flaw of the case against Julian is that he did not commit a crime. He exposed the crimes of others. Those who ordered and carried out these crimes are determined, no matter how they have to deform the British and U.S. legal systems, to make him pay.

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Zie ook: 'Assange,Gaza, And The Ugly Reality Of War Crimes' Een scherp artikel van Caitlin Johnstone.

'De meest schunnige processen van deze eeuw bijna ten einde: die over de uitlevering van Julian Assange aan de VS'

'TheBritish Court’s Decision To Uphold Sanctions Against JournalistGraham Phillips Is Troubling' Een artikel van Andrew Korybko. Nogmaals een teken dat GB géén democratie en rechtsstaat is.....

'The Crucifixion of Julian Assange' Een artikel van Chris Hedges, n.a.v. een preek die hij gaf in de Noorse stad Oslo op 20 augustus 2023.

'Navalny: de waarheid over deze fascistische-misdadiger, geëerd als vrijheidsstrijder en oppositieleider van Rusland: alweer desinformatie van westerse massamedia op topniveau' Uiteraard met aandacht voor Julian Assange.

'De Israëlische oorlog tegen journalisten en daarmee tegen de waarheid......' Ook in dit bericht aandacht voor Julian.

'VS is mede hoofdverantwoordelijk voor de dood van een VS-Chileense journalist (Gonzalo Lira) in een geheime Oekraïense gevangenis..... Leve de democratie en de vrijheid....' En dan maakt men zich in de westerse media en politiek druk om de dood van fascist Navalny en daarbij laat men Assange wegrotten in een Britse cel >> als het even 'meezit' straks in een VS cel wat is te vergelijken met de hel........ 

'De beste journalisten worden vervolgd en uitgekotst, of hoe de westerse volkeren worden gemanipuleerd'

'DeBVD (voormalige Nederlandse geheime dienst) zag overlevenden vanconcentratiekampen als een communistisch gevaar.......' Ook in dit bericht aandacht voor Julian.

'De oorlog tegen de echte journalist Julian Assange, plus die tegen de journalisten in de Gazastrook en Oekraïne' 

'Als persvrijheid echt zo belangrijk is voor de VS en GB dient men Julian Assange vrij te laten en de belachelijke aanklachten te laten vallen'

'Internationale Dag van de Persvrijheid een aanfluiting en weer niets in de reguliere media over (het martelen van) journalist Julian Assange' (3 mei 2023)

'Sacharovprijs voor Navalny, betaald door het Europees parlement en Stoltenberg stelt dat de NAVO een aanval op Rusland zal winnen' De neonazi en misdadiger Navalny kreeg een prijs en klokkenluider Assange, die deze prijs had moeten krijgen, zat en zit nu nog steeds (het is nu 22 februari 2024////) in isolatiefolter voor het openbaren van ernstige oorlogsmisdaden >> schande!!!

'Antony Blinken (VS minister BuZa) leest de wereld de les over persvrijheid terwijl zijn eigen regering deze zwaar geweld aandoet' Waarvan Julian Assange wel het grootste slachtoffer is!! Afgelopen zondag (het is tijdens deze toevoeging dinsdag 4 mei 2022/////) vond het White House Correspondents' Dinner plaats en ook daar deed men net alsof de pers volkomen vrij is in de VS, waaraan zelfs 'komiek' Trevor Noah van The Daily Show meewerkte, een leugen van enorme proporties, zie wat dat betreft ook het artikel dat Caitlin Johnstone over dit diner heeft geschreven: 'A Weird, Stupid Dystopia'

'Het USA justitieel- en gevangenissysteem: een vergelijking met De Goelag Archipel van Solzjenitsyn' En zie berichten onder de links in dat artikel.

'Navalny slachtoffer? Assange is het echte slachtoffer!!'

'Navalny wordt geprezen terwijl Assange wordt gemarteld'

'Het westen vervolgt journalist Assange, Rusland laat journalist vrij na onrust over diens gevangenschap' En nog hadden de reguliere media een grote bek over Rusland, media die niet anders hebben gedaan dan collega Assange besmeuren.....

'VS rechtszaak tegen klokkenluider Daniel Hale: ondanks het feit dat hij ook volgens de Biden administratie niemand in gevaar bracht' 

'Assange (nog) niet uitgeleverd aan de VS tegen een hoge prijs: het verpletteren van de persvrijheid'

'Internationale Dag van de Persvrijheid: geen aandacht voor de isolatiefolter die onderzoeksjournalist Julian Assange al 3 jaar ondergaat' en zie wat betreft Julian ook de berichten onder de volgende links:

'Rijk en regering wantrouwen burgers: massale controles op personen, plus druk op grote techbedrijven voor censuur op sociale media.......' (en zie de links in dat bericht!!)

'Drone slachtoffers door VS ingrijpen: ook de klokkenluiders die één en ander openbaarden'

'Instagram censureert berichten die niet passen in het buitenlandbeleid van de VS'

'Julian Assange: als het fascisme haar vermommingen laat vallen // Julians herseninfarct als teken van zijn onmenselijke behandeling' (en zie de links in dat bericht)

'10 december 2021: Dag van de Mensenrechten, Julian Assange mag worden uitgeleverd zelfs nadat de kroongetuige toegaf te hebben gelogen' (!!!!)

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Let op!! De ruimte om reacties weer te geven werkt niet altijd. Als je commentaar hebt en het lukt niet op de normale manier, doe dit dan via het mailadres trippleu@gmail.com, ik zal deze dan opnemen onderaan in het bewuste artikel, althans als je geen geweld predikt, voorts plaats ik jouw reactie ook al staat deze diametraal tegenover dat bericht. Alvast mijn dank voor jouw eventuele reactie, Willem.

Daniel Hale: een klokkenluider die 10 jaar gevangenisstraf wacht voor het openbaren van VS drone terreur

Daniel Hale is een ex-drone piloot van de VS, die een aantal overheidsdocumenten heeft gelekt naar de pers waaruit blijkt dat de VS verschrikkelijke oorlogsmisdaden begaat middels die drones....... Eerder was Hale één van de weinige militairen die het aandurfden om te protesteren tegen de gevangenneming van destijds nog Bradley Manning, nu bekend als vrouw onder de voornaam Chelsea. Hij heeft zich met anderen zelfs verweerd tegen de poging van burgemeester Michael Bloomberg van New York om een kampement van Occupy in Zuccotti Park te vegen, voor zijn steun aan Manning had Hale een week vrij genomen van zijn  werk. De poging van Bloomberg mislukte toen de duizenden demonstranten, waaronder georganiseerde transportmedewerkers (transit workers dat overigens op meerdere manieren kan worden vertaald, bijvoorbeeld ook als wegwerkers), onderwijzers, vakbondsleden van de Teamster vakbond en communicatie medewerkers, die zich rond het park opstelden, met hun leuzen de politie terugdrongen (hoe kan je iets dergelijks beter doen??).

                 

           Daniel Hale: foto overgenomen van Intelligencer  Photo: Courtesy of Bob Hayes

Uit de documenten die Hale heeft gelekt blijkt dat het doel van drone aanvallen terreurverdachten zijn, echter zoals hier al vaak opgemerkt gaat het bij 90% van de slachtoffers niet eens om verdachten, veelal vrouwen en kinderen, waarbij de VS loog dat het om terreurverdachten ging...... (overigens is het vermoorden van verdachten uiteraard een enorme oorlogsmisdaad) De VS draait zelfs de hand niet om om eigen burgers in het buitenland te vermoorden zoals de 16 jarige Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki die in Jemen werd vermoord middels een drone, hij was de zoon van Anwar al-Awlaki, een radicale geestelijke, die een week voor zijn zoon op dezelfde manier werd vermoord.... De Obama administratie loog destijds dat Al Qaida leider voor het arabische schiereiland, Ibrahim al-Banna, het doel was en dat hij zich ophield met de 16 jarige Anwar en diens neef (die ook omkwam bij deze terreurdaad...)..... 

Het vermoorden van deze 'onschuldigen' (dat is een verdachte ook tot het tegendeel is bewezen voor een rechtbank) kwam in de openbaarheid, maar er zijn duizenden meer van dergelijke gevallen, die alleen bekend zijn bij ingewijden die een hoogste veiligheidsmachtiging hebben, zoals Hale destijds...... Ofwel dergelijke zware oorlogsmisdaden en in feite misdaden tegen de menselijkheid werden tot staatsgeheim verklaard.......

Over oorlogsmisdaden gesproken, de VS laat ook verdachten vermoorden in landen waartegen het niet eens oorlog voert, zo bleek eens te meer uit de documenten die Hale lekte....

Hale wordt aangeklaagd inzake de Espionage Act, een wet uit 2017 die het strafbaar stelt als staatsgeheimen aan een vijandige staat van de VS worden geleverd, echter deze wet is niet van toepassing op het openbaren van staatsgeheimen aan de eigen bevolking zoals Hale en bijvoorbeeld Edward Snowden en Chelsea Manning hebben gedaan..... Bovendien is deze wet niet bedoeld klokkenluiders te vervolgen maar spionnen..... Middels het meer dan achterlijke plea bargain heeft Hale toegegeven een aantal documenten te hebben gelekt naar een journalist, daarmee zou hij kunnen worden veroordeeld tot 10 jaar gevangenisstraf, als hij had gepleit onschuldig te zijn zou hem een veel langere gevangenisstraf wachten...... (alleen daarom al zou Nederland nooit meer iemand mogen uitleveren aan de VS, een land dat overduidelijk geen rechtsstaat meer is....)

Chris Hedges heeft een artikel geschreven over Hale dat ik overnam van Information Clearing House (ICH), eerder gepubliceerd op Scheerpost, daaronder nog een link naar een ander artikel over Hale, geschreven door Kerry Howley, gepubliceerd op Intelligencer (onder het ICH artikel kan je klikken voor een 'Dutch vertaling' dit neemt wel enkele tientallen seconden tijd in beslag):

Bless our American traitors

By Chris Hedges

Afbeelding overgenomen van Scheerpost

July 20, 2021 "Information Clearing House" - - " Scheer Post"  Daniel Hale, an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst, stood in the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 in his military uniform. He held up a sign that read “Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet announced her transition. It was a singular act of conscience few in uniform had the strength to replicate. He had taken a week off from his job to join the protestors in the park. He was present at 6:00 am on October 14 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his first attempt to clear the park. He stood in solidarity with thousands of protestors, including many unionized transit workers, teachers, Teamsters and communications workers, who formed a ring around the park. He watched the police back down as the crowd erupted into cheers. But this act of defiance and moral courage was only the beginning. 

At the time, Hale was stationed at Fort Bragg. A few months later he deployed to Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base. He would later learn that that while he was in Zuccotti Park, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike some 12,000 miles away in Yemen that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the radical cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier. The Obama administration claimed it was targeting the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibrahim al-Banna, who it believed, incorrectly, was with the boy and his cousins, all of whom were also killed in the attack. That massacre of innocents became public, but there were thousands more such attacks that wantonly killed noncombatants that only Hale and those with top-security clearances knew about.

Starting in 2013, Hale, while working as a private contractor, leaked some 17 classified documents about the drone program to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, although the reporter is not named in court documents. The leaked documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, 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.”

Hale was coerced by Biden’s Justice Department on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. He is being held in the Alexandria Adult Detention Center in Virginia, awaiting sentencing on July 27. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison. He now faces up to a decade in prison.

Tragically, his case has not garnered the attention it should. When Nick Mottern, of the Ban Killer Drones campaign, accompanied artists projecting Hale’s image on downtown walls in Washington, D.C., he found that everyone he spoke to was unaware of Hale’s plight. Prominent human rights organizations, such as the ACLU and PEN, have largely remained silent and uninvolved. The group Stand with Daniel Hale has called on President Biden to pardon Hale and end the use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers, mounted a letter-writing campaign to the judge to request leniency and is collecting donations for Hale’s legal fund. 

“Daniel Hale is one of the most consequential whistleblowers,” Edward Snowden said on a May Day panel held at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers.  “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 percent 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.”

Speaking on Democracy Now! with host Amy Goodman a few weeks later, Daniel Ellsberg agreed that Hale “acted very admirably, in a way that very, very few officials have ever done in showing the moral courage to separate themselves from criminal activities and wrongful activities of their own administration, and resist them, as well as exposing them.”

Because Hale was charged under the Espionage Act, he, like other whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites, was not permitted to explain his motivations and intent to the court. Nor could he provide evidence to the court that the drone assassination program killed and wounded large numbers of noncombatants, including children. He faced trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, much of whose population has links to the military or intelligence community, and whose courts have become notorious for their harsh sentences on behalf of the government. 

The 2012 “Living Under Drones” report by the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (IHR&CRC) provides a detailed documentation of the human impact of US drone strikes in Pakistan. Drones often fire Hellfire missiles that are equipped with an explosive warhead of about 20 pounds. A Hellfire variant, known as the R9X, carries “an inert warhead,” The New York Times reported. 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 to slice up anything in its path” — including, of course, people.

The numbers of civilian dead from US drone strikes run into the thousands, if not tens of thousands. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization, for example, reported that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, drone strikes killed between 2,562 and 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom an estimated 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children.

Drones hover 24 hours a day in the skies over Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Without warning, the drones, operated remotely from Air Force bases as far away as Nevada, fire ordinance that obliterates homes and vehicles or kills whole groups of people in fields or attending community gatherings, funerals and weddings. The leaked banter of the young drone operators, who often treat the killings as if they are an enhanced video game, exposes the callousness of the indiscriminate killings. Drone operators refer to child victims of drone attacks as “fun-sized terrorists.”

“Ever step on ants and never give it another thought?” Michael Hass, a former drone operator for the Air Force told The Guardian.  “That’s what you are made to think of the targets — as just black blobs on a screen. You start to do these psychological gymnastics to make it easier to do what you have to do — they deserved it, they chose their side. You had to kill part of your conscience to keep doing your job every day — and ignore those voices telling you this wasn’t right.”

The ubiquitous presence of drones in the skies, and the awareness that at any moment these drones can kill you and your family, induces feelings of helplessness, anxiety and constant fear.

“Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities,” the 2012 report reads of the drone war in Pakistan. “Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school.”

Drones have become killing machines that mete out random death and usually permanently cripple those victims who survive.

“The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs,” the report reads.  “Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss.”

Hale, now 33, always had doubts about the war, but he enlisted in 2009 when Obama assumed office. He hoped that Obama would undo the excesses and lawlessness of the Bush administration. Instead, Obama, a few weeks after he took office, 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 the killing of at least 3,000 suspected militants and hundreds of civilians. He authorized what are known as “signature strikes” allowing the CIA to carry out drone attacks against groups of suspected militants without getting positive identification. He spread the footprint of the drone war, establishing drone bases in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other overseas locations to expand attacks to Syria and Yemen. The Obama administration also indicted eight whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined. The Biden administration, like the Trump and Obama administrations, continues to launch widespread global drone strikes.

“Before I joined the military, I was well aware that what I was about to enter was something I was against, that I disagreed with,” Hale says in the 2016 documentary film “National Bird.” “I joined anyway out of desperation. I was homeless. I was desperate. I had nowhere else to go. I was on my last leg. The Air Force was ready to accept me.”

In the film, Hale alludes to a difficult and chaotic childhood.

“It’s kind of funny, a little ironic too, because so far I’m the only adult male in my entire family, immediate and external, who had not been to prison so far,” he says. “I come from a long lineage of prisoners, actually, a very proud tradition of fuck-ups who get drunk and go driving, or sell pot, or carry a gun when they shouldn’t be carrying a gun, in the wrong place at the wrong time, a lot of that where I’m from.”

He was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg and underwent language and intelligence training. He worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) in Afghanistan as an intelligence analyst identifying targets for the drone program. His Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearance gave him access to the vast, global drone war hidden from public view and Obama’s huge secret “kill lists.”

“There are several such lists, used to target individuals for different reasons,” he wrote in an essay titled “Why I Leaked the Watchlist Documents,” originally published anonymously in the book “The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program” by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. The book is based on the leaked documents provided by Hale that first appeared as an eight-part series called “The Drone Papers” published by 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, and they 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.”

Data on suspects is collected and pooled by the intelligence agencies known as the Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance formed by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. 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.

He also exposed that the more than one million entries in the TIDE database includes about 21,000 United States citizens.

After leaving the Air Force in July 2013, Hale was employed by the private defense contractor National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as a political geography analyst between December 2013 and August 2014. He said he took the job, which paid $80,000 a year, because he was in desperate need of money and hoped to go to college. But by then he was disgusted with the drone program and determined to make the public aware of its abuses and lawlessness. Inspired by the peace activist David Dellinger, he, like Dellinger, had 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 own security and freedom. 

“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 film. “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. “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 US. 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, every mission you go after one person at a time, but anybody else killed in that strike is blanketly 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 warns, make remote killing “too easy, too convenient.”

On August 8, 2014, the FBI raided his home. It was his last day of work for the private contractor. A male and female FBI agent shoved their badges in his face when he opened the door.

“Immediately behind them came about 20 agents, basically all of them with pistols drawn, some wearing body armor,” he says in the film. “At this point I was extremely scared. I did not understand what was going on. Altogether, there might have been at least 30 to 50 agents in and out of the house at different points throughout the evening taking photos of every room and everything, searching for different things.”

By the time they finished his house was stripped of all electronics, including his cell phone.

For the next five years he lived with the uncertainty of his fate. He struggled to find work, fought off depression and contemplated suicide. He was barred, by law, from speaking about his plight, even with a therapist. In 2019, the Trump administration indicted Hale on four counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of theft of government property. 

The thousands of targeted assassinations carried out by drones, often in countries that are not at war with the United States, are an egregious violation of international law. They are turning huge swathos of the planet against us. The secret kill lists, which include US citizens, have transformed the executive branch into judge, jury and executioner, obliterating the right to due process. Those that commit these killings are unaccountable. Hale sacrificed his career and his freedom to warn us. He is not a danger to the country. The danger we face comes from the secret drone program, which is spiraling out of control and ominously being adopted by domestic law enforcement agencies. If left unchecked, the terror we impose on others we will soon impose on ourselves.

Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

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Hier de link naar het artikel op Intelligencer: 'Call Me a Traitor'

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Zie ook: 'Vervolging van drone klokkenluider Hale moet worden gestopt' (10 februari 2020)

'De VS heeft de meest agressieve regering'

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'Zaak van VS tegen Assange gestrand op de belangrijkste getuige, westerse media aandacht: nul komma nada'

'Julian Assange en het instorten van de rechtsorde door de onterechte vervolging van deze gelauwerde journalist'

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''Klokkenluidersbescherming' in VS: Obama en Biden lieten journalisten en redacties afluisteren om klokkenluiders te pakken' (en zie de links in dat bericht naar meer artikelen over o.a. Julian Assange en de fascistische opperschoft Navalny)

'Het verschil tussen totalitaire regimes en 'vrije democratieën' flinterdun en soms zelfs niet bestaand....'

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'Julian Assange bijna 2 jaar lang in isolatiefolter voor het openbaren van oorlogsmisdaden.......' (een bericht van 1 april 2021, ofwel intussen zit Julian Assange ruim meer dan 2 jaar in isolatiefolter.......)

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'Navalny gebombardeerd tot oppositieleider, of hoe men Rusland geheel hypocriet blijft demoniseren' (Navalny, een fascist en wat een verschil in westerse behandeling vergeleken met Julian Assange.....) (en zie de links in dat bericht)

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'Julian Assange het slachtoffer van de grootste persbreidel in deze eeuw'

'Julian Assange moet onmiddellijk worden vrijgelaten!' (zie ook de links in dat bericht, o.a. naar berichten over Assange en censuur)

'Snowden vindt het ongelofelijk dat de media VS politici niet aanspreken op totaal verschillende reacties n.a.v. 'klokkenluiden'' (9 oktober 2019) (en zie de links in dat bericht!!)

'Trump administratie klaagt weer een klokkenluider aan voor spionage' (16 mei 2019)

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'Het westen vervolgt journalist Assange, Rusland laat journalist vrij na onrust over diens gevangenschap' (en nog hadden de reguliere media een grote bek over Rusland, media die niet anders hebben gedaan dan collega Assange besmeuren.....)