![]() “Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification for my actions,” Hale wrote. ![]() He described in an 11-page handwritten letter from jail the horror he said he felt as he watched videos of Afghan civilians killed in part because of work he had done to track them down. “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.Ī 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.Īfter leaving the air force, Hale – feeling guilty over his role and believing he could make a difference in how targeted strikes were conducted – shared with a journalist he had previously met documents that showed the drone program was not as precise as the government claimed in terms of avoiding civilian deaths. The prosecutors say documents leaked by Hale were found in an internet compilation of material designed to help Islamic State fighters avoid detection. They argued that Hale, who deployed to Afghanistan in August 2012 and was honorably discharged less than a year later, abused the government’s trust and knew the documents he was sharing “risked causing serious, and in some cases exceptionally grave, damage to the national security” but leaked them anyway. Prosecutors had asked for a nine-year sentence, which would have been the longest punishment yet in a leak case. As in other other leak cases, the arguments on Tuesday were less about whether Hale illegally shared information – he has openly acknowledged having done so – and more about whether the action harmed national security and the extent to which his motives should be taken into account.
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