Hale drifted after leaving the Air Force, dropped out of the New School where he had been attending college and then got a job with a private contractor working at the government's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He worked there as a political geography analyst between December 2013 and August 2014.
"I was making $ 80,000 a year," he says into the receiver. "I had friends with college degrees who could not make that kind of money."
Inspired by peace activist David Dellinger, Hale 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 freedom. He leaked 17 classified documents that exposed the high number of civilian deaths from drone strikes. He became an outspoken and prominent critic of the drone program.
Because Hale was charged under the Espionage Act, he was not permitted to explain his motivations to the court. He was also forbidden from providing evidence to the court that the drone assassination program killed and wounded large numbers of noncombatants, including children.
"Evidence of the defendant's views of military and intelligence procedures would needlessly distract the jury from the question of whether he had illegally retained and transmitted classified documents, and instead convert the trail into an inquest of U.S. military and intelligence procedures," government attorneys said in a motion at Hale's trial.
"The defendant may wish for his criminal trial to become a forum on something other than his guilt, but those debates cannot and do not inform the core questions in this case: whether the defendant illegally retained and transferred the documents he stole," the government motion continued.
Drones often fire Hellfire missiles equipped with an explosive warhead weighing about 20 pounds. A Hellfire variant, known as the R9X, carries an inert warhead. 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, shredding anything in front of it " including people.
Drones hover 24 hours a day in the skies over countries including Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria and, before the U.S. defeat, Afghanistan. Operated remotely from Air Force bases as far away from the target sites as Nevada, drones fire ordinance that instantly and without warning obliterates homes and vehicles or kills clusters of people. Hale found the jocularity of the young drone operators, who treated the killings as if they were an enhanced video game, disturbing. Child victims of drone attacks were dismissed as "fun-sized terrorists."
Those who survive drone strikes are often badly maimed, losing limbs, suffering severe burns and shrapnel wounds, and losing their vision and hearing.
In a statement he read at his sentencing on July 27, 2021, Hale said:
"I think of the farmers in their poppy fields whose daily harvest will gain them safe passage from the warlords, who will, in turn, trade it for weapons before it is synthesized, repackaged, and re-sold dozens of times before it finds its way into this country and into the broken veins of our nation's next opioid victim. I think of the women who, despite living their entire lives never once allowed to make so much as a choice for themselves, are treated as pawns in a ruthless game politicians play when they need a justification to further the killing of their sons & husbands. And I think of the children, whose bright-eyed, dirty faces look to the sky and hope to see clouds of gray, afraid of the clear blue days that beckon drones to come carrying eager death notes for their fathers."
"As one drone operator put it," he read in court,
"'Do you ever step on ants and never give it another thought?' That's what you're made to think of the targets. They deserved it, they chose their side. You had to kill a part of your conscience to keep doing your job " ignoring the voice inside telling you this wasn't right. I, too, ignored the voice inside as I continued walking blindly towards the edge of an abyss. And when I found myself at the brink, ready to give in, the voice said to me, 'You, who had been a hunter of men, are no longer. By the grace of God, you've been saved. Now go forth and be a fisher of men so that others might know the truth.'"
It was, ironically, the election of Obama that encouraged Hale to join the Air Force.
"I thought Obama, who as a candidate opposed the war in Iraq, would end the wars and lawlessness of the Bush administration," he says.
However, a few weeks after he took office, Obama 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.
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