Daniel Hale, leaker of America’s drone secrets, sentenced to 45 months in prison
- Daniel Hale helped find targets for US drone strikes in Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia
- He fed secret documents to The Intercept, which used them for an eight-part series
A former intelligence analyst was sentenced to 45 months in prison for leaking secrets about the US military’s drone attacks that were the basis of a powerful 2015 news expose.
Daniel Everette Hale, 33, worked as a US Air Force intelligence officer developing targets for drone strikes in Afghanistan in 2011-2012, an experience he said left him emotionally scarred.
After leaving military service, in 2014 he worked for a defence contractor for eight months which gave him access to top secret documents detailing the US government’s secretive drone assassinations in Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia.
He fed the documents to The Intercept news outlet, which used them for an eight-part series that shook the administration of president Barack Obama, raising broader questions about the increase in drone strikes and the killing of innocent non-combatants.
The sentence was far below the potential 50 years Hale faced on five charges.
In a case delayed by issues of classified information and by the Covid-19 pandemic, he unilaterally submitted a guilty plea to a single charge of “retaining and transmitting national defence information”.
Citing his long-standing “serious underlying mental health conditions” relating to a difficult childhood, Hale asked for a sentence of 12-18 months.