All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am 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 I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Jesslyn Raddick.
She heads the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program at exposefacts.org, and she is a lawyer who represents national security whistleblowers.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Jesslyn?
I'm great.
Thank you for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
It sounds like another source for the Intercept has gotten busted here.
This time, I guess it's fair to say he's pleaded guilty, Daniel Hale, for leaking the drone papers, which were later published as a book, The Assassination Complex, by Jeremy Scahill.
And there's so much great information in there, which means this guy, Hale, absolutely is a hero.
I relied on that book quite a bit when I wrote my book about Afghanistan.
There's such important truth in there.
But now he's paying a severe price for it, huh?
Yes.
He has not been sentenced yet, but the fact that he contributed information that was clearly in the public interest.
It was printed throughout The Intercept in the drone paper series, as you mentioned.
It formed the basis of a book.
It ended up being the surprise ending of the Oscar-winning movie, Citizen Four.
I mean, all of these are huge contributions in the public interest that undoubtedly informed the conversation about a program that has been very secretive and about which, you know, people in that program at the top levels have lied to or misled Congress about the scope of the program.
All right.
And then so now he's pleaded guilty to a charge of violating the Espionage Act.
Is that accurate?
Yes.
Yes.
The Espionage Act is a World War One era law that is incredibly punitive.
It's a draconian law where unlike any other crime, your intent doesn't matter.
So whether you were revealing information for profit or for fame or for revenge versus disclosing information because it was in the public interest and the public had a right to know it because government was lying about it.
That makes no difference under this law.
You either made a disclosure or not.
It doesn't matter why.
And then and I mean, I think what you're saying there is you're not allowed to make that defense in court.
They will.
The judge will not allow you to say, but I did it because I love America so much.
That's correct.
That is correct.
You're not allowed to say that part.
There's a real problem here, isn't there, in the fact that espionage is espionage and we know what espionage is and this isn't espionage.
This is whistleblowing.
Exactly.
And this law, unfortunately, has a long and dark history of being used mainly against whistleblowers from Daniel Ellsberg and then in the recent era, Thomas Drake, who had revealed NSA spying.
It's the law that's being they're trying to, you know, get Edward Snowden under Julian Assange under it is being wielded uniquely against publishers, journalists and sources.
And it's chilling.
I mean, really, we don't have an official secrets act in the United States.
But this law is basically a kind of de facto official secrets act.
And it's being used against people who revealed the biggest scandals of the last century, including war crimes, warrantless secret surveillance and torture.
And you know, and the drone program is certainly up there in terms of dark secrets that the U.S. does not want exposed.
Yeah, boy.
And doesn't that just say it all?
When was the last time they prosecuted somebody for espionage under the Espionage Act?
Prosecuted someone for actual spying.
They don't.
They usually use other laws.
I mean, if you're talking about actual spies like Aldrich Ames, right, Robert Robert Hansen.
Yeah.
They don't usually use the Espionage Act on them.
It's pretty much.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, there are other laws that they can use to go after those guys.
But yeah, normally it's not the Espionage Act.
It's reserved for heroes who expose the truth about do the list again, torture, spying drones, killing innocent women and children, secret surveillance, surveillance, targeted assassination programs, the drone program and the fact that it killed, you know, an American father and son, you know, and the numbers have been grossly under reported and the the kill target list has been over broad.
We've killed a lot of number innocent civilians.
So yeah, it's people who are reporting human rights abuses.
And it's a way to punish them and to clamp down on dissent.
And now.
Before we get to Hale here, I mean, the documents that he released showed, for one thing, about the way that the military.
And or the CIA, I'm sorry, I forget now off the top of my head here, I know part of this was about Afghanistan, but it's both right, but, you know, that the Air Force and the Joint Special Operations Command, which basically the Air Force has at times acted in conjunction with the CIA, which is another just sort of side of this that gets that gets buried.
But most of what he did talk about was Special Operations Command drones, right?
Yes.
And then so this was really important.
The thing about anybody they kill is marked down as an enemy killed in action, e.k.a.
And then the only time someone is taken off of that list is if somebody proves that they were an innocent civilian, which, of course, nobody ever does.
Exactly.
I mean, there are a number of other whistleblowers that represent and who've also made disclosures about this program, which designates anyone from the age of 16 and up, you know, like a legit target.
And we're talking about teenagers, right?
Really?
You know, they call them tits, terrorists in training.
I mean, it's just the government very much wants to keep this program in the dark.
They have reported to Congress basically lower numbers of terrorists actually killed by the program and at the same time have also underreported the number of civilian casualties.
You know, for every terrorist we may have killed, we probably just created 100 more, you know, who saw the drones, who live under drones constantly flying overhead and who've had their wedding blown up or had their religious service blown up by accident.
So for every terrorist, the drone program may take out.
There's not that much evidence that it has.
It has created far more hostility among people who become terrorists.
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Now I had forgotten here, I saw this in the Washington Post that he was in the documentary National Bird.
Can you help me with the timeline here?
Yes, he was.
And he's pleaded guilty now.
And as I understand it, you have worked with him in the past, but you're not representing him at this point, right?
Is that correct?
No, I've been representing him on whistleblower issues throughout this whole time.
But no, I'm not his criminal defense.
I'm not a criminal defense attorney.
He has public defenders.
Obviously, you're not going to say anything out of school, but we are at the point now where he's pleaded guilty.
We know he's the hero who did the crime here, who committed the offense, as they put it.
But can you help me with the timeline here?
Was he in National Bird before or after he leaked these documents to Scahill?
He was in National Bird chronologically, it's hard to, I believe, after.
Yeah.
And do we know how it was that he got busted?
We don't know for sure.
I mean, one of the disturbing things about this is the fact that somehow the government has communications between a journalist and a whistleblower, and between a journalist who happens to work for a paper that prides itself on source protection and encryption and keeping people safe.
And Daniel's also schooled in that.
So it's very disturbing that even when you're using encryption, people are still getting caught.
Reporters and sources are still getting caught because encryption will protect what's going on between two people, but it doesn't protect the starting point and the end point.
Well, we saw in the case of Sterling, the CIA officer there, that they convinced the jury, which I guess a Northern Virginia jury, that, look, we have phone records that show that he did talk to James Risen, then the New York Times reporter.
And that'll be good enough for you.
We don't know what he said, but here we can prove that they talked on the phone right around the time that we accused him of delivering these secrets.
And that was enough to get him convicted.
Yeah, Jeff Sterling's case was a travesty.
This guy was convicted purely on circumstantial evidence.
And they really, the government, had threatened to bring, to force the reporter to testify against a source.
And the reporter, Jim Risen, was having none of that, and was not going to participate.
But the fact that they were brazen enough to bring that case, and again, shocker, it's in the same conservative court, the Eastern District of Virginia, where Daniel Hale's case is proceeding.
And where all of the Espionage Act prosecutions of whistleblowers like John Kiriakou and now Daniel Hale, I mean, there've been a whole line of whistleblowers who have been prosecuted.
It's called the Rocket Docket, and it's the most conservative court in the United States.
And surprise, surprise, it's located not far, just down the street from the CIA.
And then I guess the juries, this must have been studied in the past, right?
The juries in these cases are all made up of government employees and or their wives, right?
Exactly.
It's virtually impossible to find someone, it would be impossible in that area to find someone who's not a government employee or have a family member who's a government employee.
And that's exactly what they will do.
They'll be like, did you or did you not sign these secrecy agreements?
Did you or did you not promise to protect classified information?
The thing they don't tell you, and you're not allowed to bring up the word over classification, which is that the government, it's not properly classified if you're trying to hide illegal conduct.
In other words, classification cannot legitimately be used to hide crimes.
And that has, in fact, happened with torture, with secret surveillance, with drone strikes.
And you know, but still, they will wave around, well, you signed a secrecy agreement.
And they privilege the secrecy agreement more than the oath whistleblowers took to defend the Constitution.
And now, can you tell us a little bit more about Hale himself?
He had worked at the National Security Agency.
And then after that was a contractor for the satellite spies, was that right?
Yes, in a nutshell, he had, but, you know, significantly, he had served his country in the Air Force in Afghanistan, you know, so he is a veteran.
He is a veteran.
He's getting veteran benefits.
He is someone who served our country and who saw wrongdoing and went public about it.
I mean, in a way, I mean, Daniel Hale is like one of the most amazing people I've met.
He's young, but he is so well grounded in his thoughts, with his moral compass, in his ability to articulate what is going on.
You know, it's such a travesty on so many levels that the government is going after Daniel and just wants to use him to, you know, to make an example of.
In these cases, I mean, basically, they'll Jeff Sessions under Trump said, you know, we're going to nail someone to the wall.
We don't like leakers.
Trump didn't like leakers and was like, OK, we're going to go out and even though Trump was a huge leaker himself, you know, and he leaked classified information, you know, also Trump did.
But still, he was on this mission to, like, go after leakers.
And so Jeff Sessions dusted off a bunch of old espionage at cases that had never ended up being aggressively prosecuted or had never gone to trial.
And Daniel's happened to be one of those because Daniel's initial the initial activity in Daniel's case was in 2014, but then it was dead in the water for five years.
So do we know about that?
Do we know why the Obama people didn't go nail him to the wall back then?
You know, I'm not.
It sounds like they knew back then that he was the guy.
Right.
Obama took started getting a lot of heat about the fact that he brought more espionage act cases than any president before him.
And then all presidents combined.
Right.
I mean, it was some eight different espionage at cases, which was really ironic coming from the transparency president.
And I think towards the end of Obama's reign, he kind of realized this is a bad walk.
And so I think when he pardoned, you know, when he commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence, I think that was sort of, yeah, we need I need to rethink this or it may have been overkill in terms of going after whistleblowers.
But unfortunately, it created all this horrible precedent that is now being used against Daniel Hale and other whistleblowers.
And I used to say, like with Obama, I'm like, what will this power look like in the hands of someone we don't quote unquote trust?
And then sure enough, you get Trump, right, who's just maniacal in his willingness to want to punish enemies.
I mean, the Snicksonian.
Right.
And so Daniel's case gets reactivated under Trump.
But then I also say shame on Biden for, you know, he he could have just said, you know, we're not going to pursue this.
We're just dropping it.
And and has not.
So this has spanned three different presidential administrations and Democrats and Republicans.
It is bipartisan, a bipartisan failure.
And shame on all of those presidents for making this possible.
You say you want people, especially people who have served this country and served this country in war to stand up for the truth and transparency.
And then you treat them like this for speaking out.
Yeah, it's it's antithetical to the Constitution and to the First Amendment.
Unfortunately, in an espionage act case, you are not allowed to raise the First Amendment as a defense.
Right.
Man, you know, I'm glad that you keep going back to that point, because just on the shame part, look at how things are.
This is what our government is and does.
They use the law that's designed supposedly to get spies for foreign nations, real traitors to this country.
And they use it against essentially government executive branch employees who are loyal to the Constitution and to the American people and take this risk.
And they know they're breaking their secrecy oath and the documents that they signed.
They're taking the risk to tell the truth to the people so that we can do the right thing.
We see this over and over and over again.
There's nothing, you know, like, OK, for when they attack Snowden, they just lie.
They go, oh, well, he gave all this stuff to Russia and China because they don't have anything else on him.
So all they can do is lie about him and call him a traitor.
Otherwise, they have to confess that if he's a traitor, then the American people are the enemy of the American government.
Exactly.
And they caricature every whistleblower.
They did the same thing with Reality Winner, as they did with Edward Snowden, as they did with Chelsea Manning, and as they're doing with Daniel, implying that these people are somehow traitors or turncoats or secret sympathizers with, you know, with evildoers.
And that is simply not the case.
I mean, no one wakes up in the morning and decides to be a whistleblower because it's a good career move.
It's a career killer.
You will lose your job.
You will lose likely friendships and family and ultimately your freedom.
So, you know, again, people don't do this for fun or do this lightly.
I think people who are public servants do this with a very heavy heart.
And, you know, they chose their conscience over their career, but they shouldn't have to choose it over their very freedom.
Right.
Absolutely.
And, you know, a big part of that, too, right, is sort of the presumption of legitimacy on the part of the U.S. government that any secret that could be leaked would harm national security.
Otherwise, it wouldn't be a secret and it couldn't possibly be that it's to expose wrongdoing because we don't do wrong.
Whatever we're doing is right.
And so if you're leaking about it, then you're simply undermining the United States of America and skip all the actual arguments there.
Right.
No, that's exactly right.
I mean, not only are they caricaturing the whistleblower, but, yes, they are usually overinflating the value of these programs and, you know, of the important secrecy.
In fact, in most of these cases, when it comes time for sentencing, the government has been unable to produce a damage assessment.
So, you know, they're always kind of like, well, what was the actual damage?
Because in a number of these cases, you know, government people have leaked same or similar or worse stuff.
I mean, you have General Petraeus like leaking black book information to his girlfriend.
And this is stuff that was above top secret, including conversations directly between him and the president of the United States.
Yes.
And yes, exactly.
And he got like a slap on the wrist, you know, and Sandy Berger was smuggling documents out of the National Security Archives in his socks.
But no, they're going to caricature reality winner for smuggling papers out in her stockings.
And, you know, yes, people at very high levels, Leon Panetta has leaked national security.
I mean, there is a whole number of top level people who have leaked closely held national defense information, again, to aggrandize themselves in biographies or to impress a girlfriend or I mean, for myriad reasons that have nothing to do with the public interest or with truth, but just personal aggrandizement.
So, yeah, it's a total double, double edged system, you know, for the people in power versus people like Daniel Hale and reality winner and Jeff Sterling and Tom Drake and John Kiriakou and just the the line of people who have been hammered under this law.
Terry Albury is another one.
You know, good government servants, which one was trying?
Terry Albury was an FBI agent.
His case, you know, same thing.
He blew the whistle on stuff and ended up getting getting slammed.
And, you know, to your earlier point, yes, I mean, a lot of these people have been sources for the intercept.
And in fairness, I have to imagine that the intercept is at the very top of news outlets the government hates.
Right.
You know, but the flip side of that is, look, you're a news organization that prides yourself on all of this high tech encryption and source protection.
That was your founding.
It was your raison d'etre.
And the fact that I mean, right now, in good conscience, I cannot tell a client to leak to the intercept.
In fact, I mean, it would be the opposite.
Well, let me ask you this, because I think it's I think it's been reported and it's pretty clear how and why reality winner was outed.
And that was that the editors were in such a hurry to confirm her story that they just straight up provided the documents to the bad guys and said, can you confirm these documents are legit?
And that was just because they were in such a hurry to prove that they also were, you know, falling for the lies about Donald Trump being compromised by the Russians, which turned out to all be a made up hoax.
But they wanted to be on the hoax side of that.
But in this case, do we know was it that they I'm trying to remember now if they actually republish the entire documents?
I think they did in some cases.
Right.
Was that what got him caught?
You know, I'm not it's hard to know what exactly got him caught because so much of this stuff is under seal.
I mean, if you read the docket sheet, it's like reading tea leaves because a lot of these hearings, it's Kafka asked, but they take place in secret under the Classified Information Procedures Act.
And I know it's antithetical to everything we grew up believing about courts.
But these trials, I mean, sometimes even for public hearings.
And I was one of the attorneys.
I was not allowed inside because I didn't have a proper security clearance.
And I'm like, this is not a closed trial.
This is supposed to be an open trial where no classified is being discussed.
And you're locking out one of his attorneys, his family members and a bunch of other people.
It was it's.
Insane, but that is what happens under a law like the Espionage Act, the government can use code words for normal things, they can criminalize normal language, like in Tom Drake's case, they wanted to argue the word fiber optic was classified.
I'm like, are you kidding me?
The word fiber optic is used in every AT&T commercial.
But no.
Oh, but that's classified.
I mean, again, when I say Kafkaesque, I'm not exaggerating.
Right.
No, no, no.
All right.
Now, listen, do you have five more minutes?
Can I keep you there or do you got to go?
Oh, yeah, I can do five more minutes.
Can you give us five minutes on what is going on with Julian Assange right now?
Yes, with Julian Assange right now, they it's still at the extradition stage and basically the United States lost round one.
Basically, they said they you know, they were refusing the UK was refusing to extradite him because American jails are so awful.
So awful.
That was literally the reason given, like we're not going to extradite.
And mind you, right now he is in a horrible jail already in the UK.
I mean, he's in Belmarsh, which is I mean, it's a dungeon.
But but the jails in the US are even worse.
And that was literally it's just like this whole conversation.
What does it mean about us when we're prosecuting heroes under the Espionage What does it mean about us when the Brits talk about our prisons the way we talk about Turkish prisons?
Exactly, exactly.
And Assange again, the precedent would be so dangerous because the stuff Assange has published has also been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Guardian.
And now all these papers are like, oh, well, Assange isn't a real journalist, whatever that's supposed to mean.
You know, Assange is, you know, kind of a weird guy.
And Assange is this and that.
And I'm like, you guys make this argument at your peril, because if this stands, then any newspaper that reports on another country's secret programs can be I mean, they can be detained and prosecuted for espionage.
It's such a dangerous precedent.
And I wish news media outlets, both domestically and internationally, would loudly denounce what a travesty this is to free speech and free press and democracy.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, if somebody listening to this show is a national government employee whistleblower who wants to tell the truth to the people, how could you recommend to them they go about doing that without getting crucified like this?
Talk to a lawyer first, rather than after you're already being punished for blowing the whistle.
So many times, you know, people come to me after the fact and they've blown the whistle and now the heat is on.
You know, if you talk to me or any other national security lawyer who's doing whistleblowing, we can take steps to protect you.
So this doesn't happen.
We can take steps to help you make your disclosure safely and effectively without you becoming the story.
Right, OK, everybody, that is Jessalyn Raddick, and she heads the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program, Whisper, at ExposeFacts.org.
You are a true American hero.
Thank you so much, Jessalyn.
Hey, 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.
