President 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 " 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 of the so-called Vault 7 leak, published by WikiLeaks in 2017, which revealed how the C.I.A. hacked Apple and Android smartphones and turned internet-connected televisions into listening devices. He faces up to 80 years in prison. Assange " although he is a publisher and not a U.S. citizen, and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication, was indicted by the Trump administration under the Act
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. Prosecution for mere possession of such material, along with its publication 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 C.I.A. 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 Trump administration was it 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."
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