Daniel Hale of Nashville, Tennessee, (pictured) was sentenced to 45 months in prison on Tuesday for leaking top secret information about the U.S. government's drone strike in Afghanistan program.
A former Air Force intelligence analyst was sentenced to 45 months in prison on Tuesday for leaking top secret information about the U.S. government's drone strike in Afghanistan program.
Daniel Hale of Nashville, Tennessee, said he was motivated by guilt when he told an investigative reporter from The Intercept about a military drone program he believed was indiscriminately killing civilians in Afghanistan.
'I believe that it is wrong to kill, but it is especially wrong to kill the defenseless,' Hale said in court Tuesday.
He added that what he shared 'was necessary to dispel the lie that drone warfare keeps us safe, that our lives are worth more than theirs.'
But Hale was jailed after the material he leaked was found to have fallen into the hands of ISIS fighters.
Documents leaked by Hale were discovered in an internet compilation of material designed to help Islamic State fighters avoid detection, according to prosecutors.
The prosecution is one in a series of cases the Justice Department has brought in recent years against current and former government officials who have disclosed classified secrets to journalists.
Tuesday hearing did not focus on whether Hale had illegally shared secret information - he has openly acknowledged having done so.
It centered more on whether the action harmed national security and the extent to which his motives should be taken into consideration
Hale said he was motivated by guilt when he told an investigative reporter from The Intercept about a military drone program he believed was indiscriminately killing civilians in Afghanistan
As a signals intelligence analyst, Hale´s job when he deployed to Afghanistan entailed locating targets for drone strikes and tracking down cellphone signals linked to people believed to be enemy combatants (File photo)
In an attempt to explain his reasoning behind leaking the information, Hale wrote a poignant handwritten letter to Judge Liam O'Grady ahead of Tuesday's sentencing, highlighting grisly details on U.S drone strikes.
'It is not a secret that I struggle with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. both stem from my childhood experience growing up in a rural mountain community and were compounded by exposure to combat during military service, Hale wrote in the 11-page letter.
'Depression is a constant. Though stress, particularly stress caused by war, can manifest itself at different times and in different ways.'
In addition, Hale described the horror he felt as he watched videos of Afghan civilians killed in part because of work he had done to help track them down.
'Not a day goes by that I don´t question the justification for my actions,' Hale wrote.
Hale was deployed to Afghanistan in August 2012 and was honorably discharged less than a year later.
Prosecutors argued he abused the government´s trust and knew the documents being shared 'risked causing serious, and in some cases exceptionally grave, damage to the national security' but leaked them anyway.
In an attempt to explain his reasoning behind leaking the information, Hale wrote a poignant handwritten letter to Judge Liam O'Grady ahead of Tuesday's sentencing, highlighting grisly details on U.S drone strikes.
In addition, Hale described the horror he felt as he watched videos of Afghan civilians killed in part because of work he had done to help track them down.
'(A)s a result of Hale´s actions, the most vicious terrorists in the world obtained documents classified by the United States as 'Secret' and 'Top Secret' - and thought that such documents were valuable enough to disseminate to their own followers in their own manuals,' the prosecutors wrote.
As a signals intelligence analyst, Hale´s job when he deployed to Afghanistan entailed locating targets for drone strikes and tracking down cellphone signals linked to people believed to be enemy combatants.
In his letter, Hale wrote about how his experiences differed with former President Barack Obama's public assurances that all steps were being taken to prevent civilian casualties and that drone strikes helped protect the U.S.
"I came to believe that the policy of drone assassination was being used to mislead the public that it keep[s] us safe, and when I finally left the military, still processing ... I began to speak out, believing my participation in the drone program to have been deeply wrong," Hale wrote.
After leaving the Air Force, that's when Hale decided to share the documents that depict how the drone program was not as precise as the government claimed in terms of avoiding civilian deaths.
His lawyers argued in court papers that his altruistic motives, and the fact that the government hasn´t shown any actual harm occurred from the leaks, should be taken into account for a light sentence.
'He committed the offense to bring attention to what he believed to be immoral government conduct committed under the cloak of secrecy and contrary to public statements of then-President Obama regarding the alleged precision of the United States military´s drone program,' they wrote.