All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line we've got Kevin Gatstola and John Kiriakou.
Of course, Kevin writes at shadowproof.com, and of course, John Kiriakou is the former CIA officer and co-author with Gareth Porter of the CIA Insider's Guide to America's Horrible Iran Policy, whatever it is, something like that.
Anyway, and both of them good on the story of Daniel Hale, the whistleblower responsible for the assassination complex, or the drone papers.
I guess the former is the book there, and the online at the Intercept, it's the drone papers, and I'm not sure if you guys saw this, but Scahill, who I guess oversaw the production of that series that came out, and the publication of that book, I guess was the editor of that book, has put out here a statement saying, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale is a truth teller in a time of systemic deceit and lethal secrecy, but the news is he has been sentenced to prison after pleading guilty for leaking this stuff.
So tell us first of all the news, Kevin, what was the sentence, and what did the judge say, and did he have a chance, I read his written submitted statement there, did he have a chance to read it out loud to the judge?
You might want to start with John, because he was actually present at the hearing.
Oh, okay.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead then, John.
Yeah.
Sure.
Yeah, he did read it in front of the judge.
I was surprised for a couple of reasons.
First, most attorneys at sentencing tell you to not open your mouth.
Certainly my attorneys told me not to open my mouth.
They were afraid of what I was going to say at sentencing.
But the judge asked Daniel if he wanted to say anything.
He said that he did, and he got up and went to the podium.
He had what he described as six pages of comments.
And then what followed was one of the greatest pieces of oration that I think I've ever heard.
You know, for those of us who know Daniel, we know him to be painfully introverted.
He's a very humble and very quiet guy.
He's very uncomfortable speaking in front of people, let alone speaking in a courtroom packed full of people who are there to, you know, see how some of the rest of his life is going to play out.
But this speech just could not have been any more powerful.
He talked about how he's a descendant of Nathan Hale.
I said in an op-ed recently, Nathan Hale that every schoolchild knows said, I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
And he talked about why he did what he did.
He took responsibility for the, you know, technically illegal part of it, but he never backed down.
You know, the government said from the beginning that he did what he did because he wanted to ingratiate himself with journalists.
That was absurd.
He did what he did because he was morally outraged at the drone program.
And so he repeated his reasons for doing what he did.
He even went so far as to thank a long list of people, but he included the prosecutors and he named them, each one of them.
And he named the FBI agent who arrested him, and he thanked them because he knew they were just doing their jobs.
He told the judge he had been treated with respect from the beginning of the process.
And, you know, all I could think of is here's this, here's this young guy and he is more of a man than pretty much any man that I know.
He's a, he's a role model.
Yeah, it was important here, you know, his statement.
So what was it that he told the judge, John, to paraphrase here?
Yeah.
He told the judge that the drone program turned him into a murderer.
And this was wrong, that the government was lying not just to the American people about the drone program, but it was lying to those who were involved in the drone program.
He told a story about killing two young girls or one young girl and, and severely injuring her sister when he was ordered to fire on a car that may or may not have looked suspicious.
It was a story that he had told me earlier, but he said it made him it made him a child killer.
It made him a mass murderer.
And he couldn't live with himself anymore.
He needed to tell the truth about what this program was really like.
All right, now, so, Kevin, what was the sentence here?
Well, so to add to what John said, and I'll answer your question about the sentence, but the team for Stand With Daniel Hale posted some snippets of the statement he gave, the speech he delivered in court, which I hope at some point will be widely available for everyone to read and to chew over.
But he said, I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take, precious human life.
For that, I was compensated and given a medal.
I couldn't keep living in a world in which people pretended that things weren't happening that were.
Please, your honor, forgive me for taking papers instead of human lives.
So that's just one powerful snapshot of snippet from this, which, as John's referring to generally, but also, you know, it's been noted this went on for about 17 minutes.
So he got to cover a whole lot before this judge, and as I understand it, he was invited up to the stand to speak to the judge about whatever he had to say related to this case.
And so the sentence was for 45 months, and, you know, John can more specifically break it down.
But what's the more crucial aspect to talk about here is that the government, the very zealous prosecutors that throw the sledgehammer at people like Daniel Hale, wanted nine years to 11 years, thereabouts, for Daniel Hale because he insisted that what he did was morally just.
He was willing to plead guilty that this was legally wrong, but he would not accept that it was morally incorrect for him to provide documents to a reporter for publication that would expose this U.S. military drone program.
And they lost.
They didn't get nine years.
I mean, I was prepared for six or seven years to be the sentence that Daniel Hale received.
To hear that it was three years and nine months, ultimately that he, that's lower than reality winner's sentence, NSA whistleblower reality winner.
And they were using that as the baseline.
They wanted the judge in the Eastern District of Virginia to believe that reality winner's case was the case by which they should go off in and determining Daniel Hale's sentence.
And the judge did not buy that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Does it matter that, John, as you said, the prosecutors just lied about his motive, that he just wanted to be able to go drinking with Jeremy Scahill?
Was that it?
You know, this is something that I think all of us need to remind ourselves that judges hear this kind of nonsense every day.
The prosecution has to come up with a theory.
And you know, they said the same thing about me, that I was trying to ingratiate myself with the media and that I was trying to build a consulting business.
That was that was just nuts.
I wasn't trying to ingratiate myself with anybody and I had no consulting business.
The judge saw right through their story about Daniel.
You know, Daniel, they cited this this text message that Daniel sent to a friend of his years ago in which he said, maybe I'd like to go into journalism.
I get to meet with cool people and drink in cool bars and and pick up chicks and, you know, ha ha.
And that was it.
That's what they based their their silly theory on, that he wanted to ingratiate himself.
But Daniel had been so utterly consistent from the very beginning about why he did this, that it was because of a sense of moral outrage that the judge really had no alternative but to believe him over the prosecution.
Yeah, well, that's really good.
Now, three years and nine months is still a hell of a long time.
And John, the last time we talked, he said, this guy's not in good shape and you're really worried about him going to prison at all, whether he's going to make it out alive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Daniel and I became close over the last couple of years.
And he would call me regularly.
Sounding like he was at the end of his rope.
I can't tell you how many hours we spent on the phone.
You know, just me trying to get him to.
You know, stop trying to figure out how to make a noose out of his sheep.
Seriously.
So I would do my best to lift his spirits and tell him how important his message was, that every American needed to hear about his experience, that this was a book waiting to be written.
It was his role to educate Americans.
And you know, he got all the way through to sentencing.
So about a month ago, maybe six weeks ago, he and I were talking about sentencing.
And he was saying that his greatest fear was these four open espionage charges.
He had elected to plead guilty to what his attorneys believed was the most serious of the espionage charges.
It was the one that covered pretty much everything that he had been accused of doing.
And the other espionage charges were slightly lesser offenses.
So he was afraid that he would get, you know, nine times five, which would be 45 years, or nine times, I'm sorry, or 11 times five, 55 years.
And I had a real fear that that's what was going to happen as well.
So he said that they made this calculated decision that they would plead to the one and just hope against hope that either the prosecution would drop the other charges or the judge would dismiss them.
It was a Hail Mary pass, is what it was.
And I said to him, listen, there's one thing that you have to do.
And I mean this, I said, from the bottom of my heart.
Some of the best advice that my attorneys were ready to give me, it wasn't applicable to me in the end.
But when the, when the marshal service starts to do your pre-sentencing investigation to prepare the sentencing report for the judge, you have to tell them that you have a drug or alcohol problem.
You have to.
And he said, well, I kind of do.
And I said, lead with it because that'll make you eligible to be enrolled in the Bureau of Prisons RDAP program, the residential drug and alcohol program.
And I said, all it is, is they make you go to this room off the library and once a week you watch an episode of Intervention from A&E Network.
It's been on for 20 years.
And at the end of two seasons, you've graduated from the RDAP program and they take 12 months off your sentence.
So I said, you've got to do this.
Well, at sentencing, you know, the judge gave this very long explanation of why he had arrived at the number 45.
It was 90% good for Daniel.
And and I say in this op-ed that I did for Reader Supported News that I was sitting with Tom Drake, the NSA whistleblower.
And when the, when the words 45 months came out of the judge's mouth, Dan and I, I mean Tom and I turned and looked at each other and smiled because we both knew that 45 months wasn't 45 months.
45 months is this, 45 months minus 15% for good behavior.
That's 35, 39 months.
He's already been in for three.
That's 36 months because he gets credit for time served.
Then he gets 12 months off for RDAP.
That's 24 months.
Then he gets six months for halfway house and or house arrest, home confinement.
That's 18 months.
That's what he was asking for.
And I have no doubt that that's why the judge gave him 45 months because it was, it was, it was as though he, he felt sorry for Daniel.
He believed Daniel.
He appreciated that Daniel took responsibility for his actions and he gave him what he wanted without looking like he was weak.
I thought this was a very well thought out decision on the part of judge O'Grady.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, 18 months still sucks, but you're right.
It's a hell of a lot better than 55 years locked up in there.
Go ahead, Kevin.
Well, I was going to say that this is one problem with the way the sentencing was covered in the way that Daniel Hale's case in general was reported on by the establishment press in the United States over the last, let's say six or seven months.
Because when he made this guilty plea, when he pled guilty to this one charge, I believe many of the reporters naively or ignorantly thought that those four other Espionage Act charges were just off the table.
And they weren't paying attention to the anxiety and stress that John's talking about from his conversations with Daniel.
And they didn't acknowledge in their coverage of the sentencing that on the eve of sentencing, Daniel is still terribly concerned about what's going to happen.
Are they going to go to trial on these other four charges?
And he didn't know at the time, because when, during this plea hearing, and I think you might remember us talking about this on your show, Scott, but during this hearing, when it came up, the issue of these offenses, and his public defender asked for a dismissal of the charges, the judge did not allow the dismissal because the prosecutors wanted to wait until sentencing to decide what to do and to make a decision on whether or not to go to trial.
And there was no discussion about speedy trial issues.
There wasn't anything out in the open.
They did not agree that they could not pursue these charges against Daniel because of the time that had elapsed since the alleged offense is.
But still, you know, we get to this date and this happens.
And if you look at all of the mainstream coverage from Politico, Washington Post, even at The Intercept, there is no mention of these other four charges and the role that they played in applying pressure and coercing Daniel Hale into a guilty, basically a conviction.
Yeah, it was it was pretty hilarious to me when the judge said 45 months and all the mainstream journalists got up and ran out of the courtroom like a 1940s film to get to a pay phone to call in their stories and scoop each other by 15 seconds.
They missed the big news.
And the big news was the judge was having no more of this prosecutorial silliness.
And he threw the charges out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That really is huge.
I mean.
I don't know, as much as the DOJ was trying to make an example of this guy, did the judge just make another example out of him or that's too hopeful point, Scott?
That's a very important point.
There was a lot of discussion between the prosecution and the judge about setting an example.
Right.
They raised my case.
They raised the Sterling case.
They raised reality winner and said that Kiriakou sentence was too short.
We regretted that sentence after we had agreed to it because then it made the Sterling sentence too short.
And what we're looking for as a guideline is something closer to the reality winner sentence.
And Daniel's lawyer said, wait a minute, the reality winner sentence was in the Northern District of Georgia.
We're not talking about the Northern District of Georgia.
We're talking about the Eastern, the Eastern District of Virginia.
And they said, well, this was a national security case and reality winner was a national security case.
And then Daniel's lawyer said, fine, then let's talk about the Petraeus case in the Western North Carolina.
Let's talk about misdemeanor charges in 18 months of unsupervised probation.
And then they said, oh, OK, well, all right, let's see your point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That Petraeus.
No, that's different.
We like him.
Yeah.
What I'm finding here, though, and I think the judge understood this and the prosecutors didn't, was that there is no such thing as a deterrent sentence.
If somebody is genuinely morally outraged by something that he sees, something like a murder program, it doesn't matter how long the sentence is going to be.
He's going to blow the whistle.
And if there are other people considering blowing the whistle and they are equally morally outraged, they're not going to be put off by the length of any sentence.
And that's just something the Justice Department doesn't get.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's just a plain fact of our punishment bureaucracy that our prosecutors that we have in jurisdictions across the country won't admit is that deterrence doesn't tend to actually make much of an impact on whether people commit crimes, even outside of Espionage Act prosecutions.
It just isn't borne out by the actual statistics.
And when you look at real life cases with people, but to your thing that you're saying about whether the judge was maybe going to turn it around and make an example out of the prosecutors.
I've talked to several people who were in attendance, including John, who's here, and it seems like he was just, you said he'd had it.
One part of the hearing in which I think he absolutely had it was their insistence and the way that they were policing, how he talked about what Daniel Hale supposedly exposed in public court, because I know that there was a moment before they went into closed session where he referred to the horn of Africa very generally.
And that drove the prosecutor's baddie and they got up and stopped everything.
And I know he said something to the effect of like, is that not general enough for you?
Because he wasn't talking about any specific countries.
And by the way, it's not actually classified when it comes to drone strikes in that region.
I mean, people are well aware that Somalia, that the militant group al-Shabaab is being attacked by U.S. drones and has been.
And so then they go aside and I know there was a, they put on the machine, the Hiss machine, so that they can have this conversation without people in attendance hearing.
And so they're talking and then they come back.
And but yeah, I mean, he was, he had to be profoundly irritated that the prosecutor stopped the proceeding to nitpick him saying the words horn of Africa.
You know, it was funny too, as soon as those words came out of the judge's mouth, horn of Africa, the prosecutor stood up and the judge said, that wasn't classified, right?
And then nobody said anything.
And they're just standing there staring at each other.
And finally the prosecutor says, may we approach your honor?
And then this really like crazy loud white noise came on.
Somebody switched it on.
It was, it was so loud as to be like deafening.
And Daniel and all 10 attorneys and the court reporter went up to the judge.
They were up there at least five minutes.
And what they ended up agreeing to clearly was to just pretend that the whole thing had never happened.
So they turned off the white noise.
Everybody went back to their tables and then they just moved on to the next topic.
This is the machine, by the way, Scott, that they use at the Guantanamo military tribunal in order, I think it's the same and it's probably the same thing that Julian Assange got for himself so he could try and deceive his, the espionage operation while he was in the Ecuador embassy.
I mean, this is a loud thing that like, then you talk under.
The whole thing was like, it was like watching a movie.
It really was.
The prosecutors were melodramatic trying to prove how tough they were and that the safety and security of the Republic was at stake.
And then on the other side, you've got this guy who he's an everyman and he's a nice guy.
Like if you just sat with him for 15 minutes, you would want to be friends with him.
And he did what he did because it was the right thing to do.
It was like a Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of setting.
And you know, I said to Tom Drake, I wonder if this is one of those films where the good guy actually wins.
And it was in the end.
Yeah, it certainly could have been worse.
All right.
Sorry.
Hang on a second.
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Now here's the important thing, as you pointed out here, I guess on your Twitter page from the other day, Kevin, was that under Obama, they didn't charge him with espionage.
It was the Trump people that did.
And just like with the maximum pressure campaign against Iran, the Biden government is sticking with the Trump policy rather than going back to the Obama policy on this, where they could have just dropped it and said, well, we always thought it was too much.
But were they prosecuting him at all?
The Obama guys or they were leaving him alone?
This all happened under Trump.
Yes.
So this tweet refers to the defense sentencing memo that was given to the judge where they asked we would like 12 to 18 months for Daniel and then they make their case for why 12 to 18 months is reasonable.
And in the course of their argument, they mentioned during discovery before they were ever supposed to go to trial, they got a document that shows that in the Justice Department's National Security Division, there was dissent among the superiors of that part of the Justice Department.
And eventually they decided that they were unwilling to back charges against Daniel Hale.
It's hard to tell if there was ever a formal closure of the case, but the defense does say that the investigation came to an end in 2015.
That's in their submission to the court.
And so then time passed.
And it wasn't until May 2019, which is actually around the time that they made the indictments against Julian Assange public.
It's not until May 2019 that the Trump Justice Department, it would have been Bill Barr, his department, proceeds with going after Daniel Hale.
And they actually share the same bigoted, Islamophobic, racist, and unconventional, and just a supreme jerk of a prosecutor, Gordon Cromberg, who is leading and involved in the prosecution against Assange, also was, I understand, in the courtroom for sentencing against Daniel Hale.
And there's more to say about some of what the prosecution side, but yeah, it is true that there appears to be a difference in the way those administrations chose to handle this.
And I've been thinking about, I have nothing to back this up, but I've been thinking in my head about why the outcome might be different from Trump versus Obama.
And what I've arrived at, and John, you can tell me if you disagree, but I believe that the Obama White House was extraordinarily concerned about their image to the world.
And if you think back to that time, there were some nicknames going around like President Kill List, Drone Warrior in Chief.
And it's my view that they didn't think it would be great to put somebody who was a drone whistleblower on trial under the Espionage Act, and also allow for the possibility that they looked at the number of cases they had, and it had become a refrain that media organizations and press freedom groups repeated over and over again, that President Obama was responsible for prosecuting more people under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined.
That's a fact, but it was said over and over again, and perhaps they thought they had met their quota and they weren't going to go forward.
This was a second term that Daniel Hale would have been indicted under.
And perhaps he was thinking about his legacy and less about making an example out of people at this point.
Yeah.
All right.
That's an important point.
This keeps coming up.
And the last time I was asked about it, I pointed to the last interview that I did with you, John, where we discussed this.
But really, I do all the talk in there, and I can't remember when you originally told me this.
It might have just been right before we went on the air.
Maybe it was the interview before that or something.
But you had explained why, unlike sometimes, this bust was not the Intercept's fault.
And I know that Matthew Cole, the Intercept reporter that burned Reality Winner, is the same guy before he was at the Intercept who burned you for verifying the identities of some CIA torturers for which you went to prison under an espionage act of prosecution here.
But what is the truth about or not about Scahill and the Intercept somehow getting Hale in trouble here?
Yeah.
Daniel does not blame Jeremy Scahill for his own legal problems.
And it's because when Daniel provided the information to Jeremy, Daniel decided to go public.
He appeared in public with Jeremy at a symposium.
He appeared in the documentary National Bird.
He wasn't trying to protect his own identity.
He did tell me that he underestimated the—he did underestimate, rather, the government's reaction.
But he doesn't blame Jeremy Scahill for outing him.
OK.
Now, I'm trying to remember, in the original story, does it name him there or he's still an unnamed source, at least as far as that one, right?
In the original series of the Intercept?
Yeah, I think—yeah, it said that they had come—they had come by secret documents related to blah, blah, blah.
But I don't think they used his name.
I see.
But anyway, it wasn't that they, you know, burned him the way that Cole had burned Winner or any of that.
Or you.
Correct.
Yeah.
And by the way, we really need to highlight this, and I guess I'll let you have the last word about this part if you want, Kevin, here before we have to go.
And that is the drone papers at the Intercept and this great book.
There are massive and serious and important revelations in here.
This isn't just a leak of some documents.
It's a leak of some documents with some things we needed to know in there.
Can you talk a little bit about what it was that this guy sacrificed so much for here?
Yeah.
And actually, I'd like to, if you have time, come back to the effort by the prosecutors to get secret evidence into the sentencing.
Go ahead.
The floor is yours.
Okay.
We talked about the drone papers and what he did.
That's definitely important.
But I think people should know that the prosecutors were very desperate and tried this ploy to make the judge basically fall back on, just remember that in the U.S. we have a religion and it's national security, and that he shouldn't forget to respect the religion when sentencing Daniel Hale.
But it didn't work.
And so they go into a closed session.
People who were in attendance got kicked out.
John probably can tell you he got kicked out of the hearing.
And the hearing that they had was over something that was described in the filings by the defense as an internet compilation video.
Or it was described by prosecutors as an internet compilation video that comes from someone presumably alleged leader of ISIS within Islamic State.
And this video was one that was to followers of ISIS.
And it mentioned two of the documents that Daniel Hale was charged with disclosing.
And so the prosecutors say, hey, this is it.
This is what we've got.
This is proof that there was a risk of serious or exceptionally grave damage.
That proves it.
There's a guy from ISIS talking about Daniel Hale's documents.
The only problem was picked up by this guy, Harry Cooper, who the defense got to file his own comments.
And he told the judge that I was an executive expert at the CIA.
I trained top directors, including the CIA director himself, on managing and taking care of classified information.
And I'd like to tell you why I think this is a bunch of bunk.
Because if you're a terrorist group, you're not going to shout from the mountaintops that you've got these documents that give you a tactical advantage against the United States.
You're going to covertly go about your business, trying to get the most out of this new advantage you've gained from these documents that were previously secret.
So he said it's more likely ISIS is telling the U.S. government they got these trophies, or they're telling the world and their followers they got these trophies, look, look here, these are U.S. documents.
But it doesn't mean that they're not suddenly undetectable by the national security agencies.
And for what it's worth, it seems like this was a total fail.
But it's also not the first time that the U.S. prosecutors in the Justice Department have tried this kind of thing.
This wasn't their case.
But in Chelsea Manning's case, they tried to do this to her within the aiding the enemy charge that was leveled against her in addition to the Espionage Act offenses.
And when I was there, one of the hearings, they played an al-Qaeda recruitment video.
And it mentioned WikiLeaks documents.
And they tried to say that that somehow made her guilty.
But ultimately, that military judge threw out the aiding the enemy charge.
So they keep trying to say that when, you know, terrorists read documents that are published by The Intercept or any other media organizations, that this amounts to committing a crime under the Espionage Act.
And I don't really know that they're faring so well with this theory.
Yeah.
Thank goodness for that, because, of course, you could twist that on anything at all, you know.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
All right.
We've got one more here.
One of y'all talk about killing people with robots.
Go John.
You're the CIA assassin.
You go ahead.
You know, there was there was really nothing that that was terribly shocking in any of these documents.
It was kind of like, you know, my revelation, which the FBI later described as the worst kept secret in Washington.
Pretty much everything that Daniel revealed, we already either knew or assumed it was the fact that he had confirmed it.
I think that was so angering to the to the Justice Department.
But what he talked about was that the government was lying or has been lying consistently when they describe these drone strikes as as pinprick or as, you know, laser focused.
It just wasn't true.
There were many, many innocent civilians who were killed using drones.
But more than that, he talked about not talked about the information he released was was that the decisions to strike are still made by human beings and human beings make mistakes every single day about what a person's intent is.
You know, just the fact that you're 14 years old and you're a male makes you an enemy combatant, according to to DOD policy.
And so anybody that looked from the sky like they were 14 years old and dressed as a boy was going to die.
And the government doesn't want you to know that.
Yeah, yeah.
His was the his was the E.K.A. revelation that people are being designated enemies killed in action posthumously.
And so the official civilian casualty counts from the U.S. government are not trustworthy.
You should not believe them because they are not doing investigations into these people and their identities.
They are presuming they are terrorism suspects or militants when they are killed.
And that you can pick that up from their own policy.
And the other thing, which is a good point to end on, is that part of the motivation of Daniel Hale seems to be that he was able to watch President Barack Obama on television or in YouTube videos tell lies about the drone program.
And he himself knew from his position as a signal intelligence analyst in Afghanistan that this was not the way it works.
President Obama saying you have to have an imminent threat in order for people to be selected as targets and killed.
And in fact, that is not the standard.
You know, what does that remind you of right in that story of Daniel L. Davis when he saw David Petraeus lying about the war in Afghanistan and Edward Snowden when he saw James Clapper lying about the NSA spying on us?
That's exactly.
You can't get away with that.
Yeah.
So the standard was that if it just threatens a so-called U.S. interest, that you can launch the strike, which could be anything.
You could twist that to apply to almost anything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And now it says here, too, in the manhunting in the Hindu Kush section here, chapter five, that nine out of 10 people who died in the airstrikes were not the Americans' direct targets.
In February 2013, Haymaker airstrikes had resulted in no more than 35 jackpots, a term used to signal the neutralization of a specific targeted individual, while more than 200 people were declared enemy killed in action.
And then as you were referring to there, unless they're posthumously proven to have been innocent, which nobody's asking, then they're all counted as guilty or else why would we kill them then?
And then, of course, the jackpot just means somebody's phone number who somebody says is connected to somebody else's phone number and no real intelligence at all.
That's exactly right.
Man.
Go ahead.
Well, just very quickly, he is the drone whistleblower, and this is what made the most splash.
But something that was brought to the attention of the judge came from the Council on American Islamic Relations and the fact that one of their attorneys, Ghadir Abbas, and there are other groups that have pursued these kinds of cases.
But Daniel released a document called Watchlisting Guidance, and it contained a lot of information about the criteria with which people who are innocent, or it applied to the way in which innocent people, Muslim Americans especially, end up on the no-fly list.
And this document was used in cases over the last 10 years to defend the liberty interest that people have in travel, and they were able to clear their names, force the government to remove them from the no-fly list.
And without this document, without this proof that could be brought before the judge, it's questionable whether CAIR and these people would have been able to get themselves off the no-fly list.
Yeah, that's huge.
Did it seem like that made an impression on the judge, John?
Did you see?
Yes, it did.
It made an impression on the judge.
You know, I can't stress enough how fortunate Daniel was to have drawn Judge O'Grady.
So many of us have had Judge Leanie Brinkema, who's a hanging judge on these national security issues, and she normally reserves all national security cases for herself.
She didn't do that with the Julian Assange case, although it might even be worse for Julian because his judge used to be a FISA court judge.
But how Daniel drew Judge O'Grady, I don't know.
It was it was a stroke of great luck.
Yeah, sounds like it.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you both for your efforts, you know, John, obviously, for your personal friendship and supporting this guy and covering this story.
And for you, Kevin, of course, all of your heroic work defending all the important whistleblowers of our era and covering their trials and tribulations here.
So you guys are both great.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
