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.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys on the line.
I've got Kevin Gostola.
He is, of course, at shadowproof.com.
Welcome back to the show, Kevin.
How you doing?
Hey, thanks.
Happy to have you here.
You're always sticking up for the whistleblowers, man.
That's what I like about you.
So other things.
This one is called Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale Detained at Facility Where Chelsea Manning Attempted Suicide.
And then before that, I think the article before that was that he's being held without bail now.
Essentially, he's been he pleaded guilty.
He's been convicted.
And but before his sentencing, they're not even going to let him be free until then, huh?
Yeah, well, this is basically the same article.
I just changed the headline this morning because The Intercept used the exact same headline as me.
And I was a little upset by it, but but but yeah, so the story that is of crucial importance is that he was out on supervised release.
And he was waiting sentencing.
And this is a military veteran.
This is someone who was part of a joint special operations task force, was involved in the targeting, picking who would be killed or captured, and blew the whistle on the assassination complex, was in contact with Jeremy Scahill, journalist at The Intercept, and worked with him on the drone papers.
That was a tremendous work of investigative journalism there.
I don't think he was the only source, but he was a key source for these drone papers.
And all of this information, he added his voice to by anonymously authoring a chapter in the assassination complex, it was the book that Jeremy published.
And this was an addition, in addition to the Dirty Wars project that Jeremy did, built on that work.
And he pled guilty on March 31 to one charge, simply because, as you know, from following the Espionage Act cases, it's incredibly harsh, the way the Justice Department comes at you, and you don't really have an ability to go into a courtroom and defend yourself and claim that you were doing something that you believed was in the public interest, or you were exposing war crimes, or whatever you want to put forward as your defense.
It's simply that you leaked the document, and that makes you guilty.
And so he accepted a plea, or he said he would plead guilty to one charge, hoping that he can limit his prison sentence.
And then now, without any evidence whatsoever, mostly just a fabricated pretext, they take him into custody, and he's going to be in jail at the Alexandria Detention Center until July 13, when he's sentenced.
Meanwhile, he will have very limited, if any, access to his attorney to work on whatever he needs to prepare for sentencing.
And also, he's in conditions of solitary confinement, and that is going to add to the post-traumatic stress disorder that he already has from his time in the military.
And he's someone who struggles.
We know that he was seeing a therapist.
The court took notice of this.
And Judge Liam O'Grady, when he was pleading guilty, was very concerned about his mental health.
He asked him, if you feel like you're going to harm yourself, I want you to tell me.
And it was really a rare exchange, because often you just see from judges this robotic parroting of the law, acting like their hands are tied, they can't do anything.
But he genuinely seemed like he was concerned for Daniel's well-being, and that also played into his decision to not revoke his bail and have him taken into custody after he pled guilty.
So I'll stop there.
Man.
Well, I'm just going to get philosophical for a second here.
This is insane.
What are we talking about?
The guy was Joint Special Operations Command, top-tier special operations forces.
Out of the goodness of his heart, he leaked the truth about how horrible the drone program, particularly in Afghanistan, was, but elsewhere, too.
And this was serialized at The Intercept with the drone papers and then published as a book, The Assassination Complex, which is so important, which absolutely is mandatory reading for anybody who cares about this stuff at all.
It's such an important book.
And then I don't know what the hell is going on with operational security over there at The Intercept.
But these guys keep getting burned.
Every source they have gets burned.
And but here they're treating this guy.
I mean, the fact that they even would use the Espionage Act at all almost says it all.
But they're treating him like he's a foreign agent, a saboteur trying to destroy the American government, trying to hurt our military, to hurt our country when, uh, he's just a source for journalists who care about reporting on crimes and immorality.
And then this just goes on.
This is the how many guy in a row that they have prosecuted just in since the Obama years through from Obama through Trump and into Biden now for being a source for American journalists.
Right.
It's like they're going to RT and giving this stuff to Putin to use against us.
Right.
They're going to The New York Times.
They're going to The Intercept.
And then our government puts them in solitary confinement.
Yeah.
Bananas.
It sounds like I'm lying, doesn't it?
Well, and at the same time would claim to care about veterans and their health.
And you're sticking him in an Alexandria detention center where we saw Chelsea Manning attempt suicide at the end of a year of resisting the grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks.
And she didn't do that because, uh, because Alexandria detention center is this nice hotel where you can go stay for, uh, for a year and, uh, maybe, you know, go to the day spa, but because it's harsh and she couldn't stand it.
And it was, it was making it difficult for her to, to, to live.
And so this is what now we see Daniel Hale going through.
And this facility came up in the case against Julian Assange as one of the reasons why Judge Vanessa Barretzer was not willing to extradite Julian Assange to the U.S. for a trial because he would be held in harsh conditions in this facility before a trial, before he was convicted, before he ever made it to any super max or maximum security prison in the United States.
And I just think that's a really important point to make because, you know, here we have a government who, especially with Joe Biden, has been projecting to the world that it's upholding human rights, that it cares about press freedom.
We just went through the last week marking World Press Freedom Day, and you have this dope Secretary of State Anthony Blinken going around talking about how there are some governments around the world that target, repress and harass and retaliate against journalists and put them in jail.
Meanwhile, you've got Assange and Belmarsh, but also you've got this media source, you've got Daniel Hale, this media source that your Justice Department just had put in detention before he's even sentenced.
He's not a danger to anyone.
He's not even really a danger to himself because he has a support network of people who care about his psychological well-being.
He has other people who worked in the military who care and understand what he's going through.
And yet he gets picked up, put in a cell, he's sleeping on a cement bed, and this is what he has to deal with while he's wondering, what's going to happen on the day of my sentencing?
What am I going to get?
Am I going to get a three-year sentence?
Will I be getting a five-year sentence?
The other thing, the other twist that I don't know if you're aware of, is that the Justice Department didn't actually agree to drop additional charges against him.
So he faced five charges, and he only pled guilty to one.
And the Department's prosecutors told the judge that they would not dismiss those additional charges because they want to wait and see how sentencing goes down on July 13th.
And if they're not happy, they might force him to go to trial on those other four charges, which makes what he's going through psychologically even more traumatic.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
So you're constantly buying things from Amazon.com.
Well, that makes sense.
They bring it right to your house.
So what you do, though, is click through from the link in the right-hand margin at scotthorton.org, and I'll get a little bit of a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale.
Won't cost you a thing.
Nice little way to help support the show.
Again, that's right there in the margin at scotthorton.org.
Hey, you want to know what industry is recession-proof?
Yes, you're right, of course, pot.
Scott Horton here to tell you about Green Mill Super Critical Extractors, the SFE Pro and Super Producing Parallel Pro can be calibrated to produce all different types and qualities of cannabis crude oils for all different purposes.
These extractors are the most important part of your cannabis oil business for precision, versatility, and efficiency.
GreenMillSuperCritical.com.
Hey, y'all, Scott here to tell you about Zippix Toothpicks.
They're full of nicotine is the thing about it.
Personally, I miss the stuff terribly, and I'm really looking forward to getting back on it.
Zippix Toothpicks may be perfect for smokers and vapors who can't afford to stop working and go outside for a break all the time, or for those traveling in planes, trains, and buses and ferries and such.
It's the most affordable way to get your nicotine on the market, and they taste great and come in all different flavors.
Use promo code Scott Horton and get 10% off Zippix Toothpicks at ZippixToothpicks.com.
And now, he didn't have a deal, right?
He just pleaded guilty and was like throwing himself on the mercy of a court, but did not have an actual plea agreement with the feds.
Is that right?
It's at the mercy of the Justice Department, right?
So yeah, and he's just doing this thinking that if he just accepts that he did the whole gambit of what they're alleging, that they will be okay with that.
The problem here is what we see in a lot of prosecutions, there's a stacking of charges.
So yes, as the judge notes, I was able to follow the hearing remotely by calling into the court and he noted, this one charge basically covers all the conduct that you alleged against him.
Those other four charges just stack on top of that and are different crimes that could be said to have been committed or they're repeat offenses.
So really, the Justice Department should be satisfied with the singular charge, but they probably won't be.
Or they definitely wanted to leave the door open for if they don't get a long enough sentence, they could take him to trial and keep him in prison for a longer time.
Man, that's just nuts.
All right, and then so, I mean, I don't even know what to say.
I was trying to come up with a question about better lawyers intervening somehow to do anything, but it sounds like all these ships of sale.
This guy is done.
He does have a public defender who is doing a decent job of looking after him.
I suppose, just for the people who listen, it might be worth noting that the Justice Department did give a handy list of the documents that they believed Daniel Hale was responsible for disclosing.
It wasn't that difficult to match up if you looked at the dates what those documents were.
So to Daniel Hale's credit, I can quickly give you a rundown of what some of the things are that Daniel Hale used.
So there's this report, Watch Commander, Barack Obama's Secret Terrorist System by the Numbers.
I believe, if you look at the list, that he contributed documents that helped expose what the Intercept described or what Scahill and Ryan Devereaux described as nearly half of the people on the U.S. government's widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group.
In fact, more than 40% are described by the government as having no recognized terrorist group affiliation.
So this is the system in which they would likely produce targets for the killer capture mission.
And then we had documents on small footprint.
That's what they call them.
These aren't my words.
Some of these are ridiculous words.
But small footprint counterterrorism operations that are ongoing in Somalia and Yemen, which involve targeted assassinations.
Then there was the Special Operations Task Force that is deployed for conflicts in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula that uses the army base or the military base in Djibouti as a platform to go after al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Shabaab.
And also then a story about British citizen Bilal al-Berjawi, who was stripped of a citizenship before he was killed.
And by the way, he's a British citizen, stripped of his citizenship.
And then a U.S. drone came in and assassinated him in 2012.
So all of these documents are of public interest.
We need to know that our government is abusing its authority and doing this to people rather than if they're accused of terrorism offenses.
And it's my view, rather than if they're accused of terrorism offenses, they should be put on trial and they should get to defend themselves before they are put in prison for any amount of time.
Yeah.
You know, I quoted my book about Afghanistan from the Assassination Complex book and the part where they talk about how they just presume that any male that they kill is an enemy.
E-K-I-A, enemy killed in action.
And the only time they'd be classified as oops, an accidental civilian death would be if they went and investigated and proved that it was, which of course they have no interest in doing and never do.
And so anybody they kill is presumed to be an enemy.
And it says it right there in not just black and white, but in, you know, fun animated PowerPoint slide presentation style, you know, just like the Snowden leak, the NSA docs where it's nice pictograms and everything to make sure you understand just how horrible it is.
Yeah.
And in honor of Daniel Hale, just to put this in the larger context of what the Biden administration is doing, they know that Donald Trump overturned just about every modest safeguard or guideline that was put in place when he was president to somehow, if you believe it, I don't know, it's up to your own perception of whether government actually cares about international law or rules of engagement.
But that apparently all of those safeguards that they adopted were tossed aside by the Trump administration, that they were, we had at justsecurity.org, Hina Shamsi was able to go over these files that were obtained after a lawsuit, I believe through the Freedom of Information Act.
And it just showed that the rules cast aside any kind of constraints.
And so right now, that's the system that Biden has.
Biden has Trump's system.
It's not Obama's system, actually.
He has the Trump system of not having anything in his way if he wants to assassinate people, the same kind of people that Daniel Hale would have been exposing as the targets of these assassination operations.
So I think that's just an important context to know where we're at, that we're targeting the drone whistleblower.
But meanwhile, the assassination complex is back to its early days, being able to get away with the kind of murder it was engaged in at its first phase.
Well, now, they say that I think, is it Blinken or Sullivan is leading a review?
I think it's supposed to be Blinken is leading a review of the entire war on terrorism policy.
If his decisions or his takes are making it into Biden's speeches, then I think his speech on Afghanistan, where he talked about, well, you know, the terrorist enemy isn't even really about Afghanistan.
Now they've kind of spread all over the place with the way he said it.
The implication being that the war against them is not going to stop.
You know, wherever there's a Sunni with a rifle that somebody says he knew somebody who once knew Zawahiri, then that'll be good enough.
Or as you said, maybe not at all.
Just a Sunni with a rifle somewhere.
Yeah.
I mean, what was the quote he gave in his joint address to Congress was, we will maintain an over-the-horizon capacity to suppress future threats to the homeland.
And this was to reassure Congress, who I don't think really wants a withdrawal from Afghanistan, at least as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure that if you put that to a vote in Congress, they would have majority support, even though some of them do give pretty good rhetoric about wanting to end forever wars or however they would refer to it.
But he's talking about over-the-horizon capacity.
That's a euphemism for assassinating people with drones or other methods or deploying joint special operation forces for night raid missions where they helicopter in, like the raid against Osama bin Laden, and then they just duck out very quickly and they're not on the ground for an extensive period of time.
And so that's the sort of mission that lay in the future.
And that could be just as destabilizing as any occupation, especially if it's clear in those countries that they don't have control over their sovereignty and the United States can just disrupt any community at any time by going on these missions that make it seem like there's nefarious people living there.
But meanwhile, they never get a trial to prove whether they're actually involved in these operations and you just spread suspicion among those villages.
And they think, okay, do we have terrorists hiding out?
Do we have militants?
Maybe they do.
But if they don't, now they just suspect that everyone in there might be part of some terrorist supercell.
So I think it's hugely destabilizing what lies ahead, even as we know that the unfortunate blowback, which I think you could speak to extensively having written the book, it's going to be that, you know, U.S. leaving just means that a lot of these warlords and Taliban forces are going to be the people in control.
There's nobody else to take their place.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, you have this entire phenomenon, too, which Nick Terse has done the best job speaking of the intercept, but also for Tom Dispatch and other places where he's just tracked SOCOM and JSOC all across Africa.
And I think mostly that means Rangers and Green Berets training and running local special operations forces to fight, you know, whoever, whatever government our government is getting along with, any armed enemies they might have immediately go on the list.
And they're at that point that the the level of control is all just shades of gray.
In a sense, these are auxiliaries of the American Pentagon, even though we're talking about the militia or the National Guard forces of the Central African Republic or something where the American people have no idea that America is involved at all.
Right.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So and just to be clear here, as we wind down our conversation, this is the first whistleblower to be convicted under the Espionage Act by President Joe Biden.
So this is this is this is Daniel Hale's place in U.S. history.
I don't actually remember who the first one was under Obama as far as the Espionage Act goes.
Certainly the most high profile were Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden was never brought to trial, but that was quite a large case.
He continues to live in exile in Moscow.
But this is this is this is Joe Biden and he and his people can make all kinds of claims that they want to about being different than Trump.
But they're very much continuing the same kind of policy that was adopted by Attorney General Eric Holder and then ramped up by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
And there's there's no evidence at all that they've rethought the way in which the administration goes about these highly, highly repressive leak prosecutions, which target sources.
But they also target journalists.
To me, they are just as damaging to press freedom as they are to whistleblowers.
And I, you know, it's a safe bet here.
Well, let's just admit it doesn't excuse any kinds of security, operational security mishaps that might have occurred.
And to my knowledge, there's nothing that's been put forward that Jeremy did wrong to cough up Daniel's identity, whereas we have the case of the reality winner prosecution where there were definitely errors that were inexcusable.
And so I think it's a safe bet that our intelligence system is targeting the intercept and anyone who tries to communicate with it.
Right.
That's just something they they would know and they have to get around.
And it's on them as a as a site that advertises that any whistleblower can come to them and leak and that they can use an anonymous submission system or whatever they make available.
It's on them to not lie to people and make it seem like they're going to be able to protect them.
So but again, the larger issue is, I think when we finally do get the files that we'll be able to get declassified, it's going to show that during this time in history, from 2013 to 2020, there was an operation that was targeting the intercept.
I mean, he Daniel Hale's time coming forward goes back to 2014, 2015.
This is the same.
This is very close to the same time period of Edward Snowden coming forward.
So all of this would have been happening under Barack Obama of looking at the intercept and trying to unearth who it was that was bringing the Obama administration under scrutiny.
Right.
And again, I mean, just on the basic level here, why do we have whistleblower protections at all?
Because supposedly the people are the boss and the government serves us.
And there has to be an avenue for people in government to be able to tell the truth about their bosses when their bosses are committing crimes against the population of this country or against our constitution that they've sworn their oath to.
So then how is that fit?
How does that fit with prosecuting, you know, what?
I don't know, a solid dozen or two dozen something great whistleblowers in from the time of W. Bush through today and now including this guy and and the next guy, too, that they're already probably targeting.
You know, it's it's crazy that we can allow this to continue on this way.
And you got no cases right where the smear job held up at all.
Right.
In other words, Manning, Snowden, Thomas Tam, Thomas Drake and and Julian Assange and all these people, all of them wearing their heart on their sleeve.
All of them have their motives right up front for us to see.
Why did Daniel Hale do this?
Because what the JSOC was doing was wrong and he thought the people needed to know.
End of story.
And then but we allow our government to continue to treat people like this, like they're serial killers or actual traitors to the Russians, like some kind of Robert Hansen or Aldrich Ames figure, which is just insane.
But yeah, right.
And if and if we don't know these people, if we don't keep track of their cases and keep tabs on what's happening to them, then absolutely we're going to see less people willing to come forward, which will add to the secrecy.
And then all you get is controlled opposition, if any opposition at all, because that's what the whistleblower protection laws allow for.
They allow for only a very narrow range of opposition to what this government is doing every single day, what those agencies are willing to tolerate as pushback.
In fact, I don't know how much you know about the whistleblower laws, but a lot of them are tailored in order to just protect you as like an employee.
So they're they're set up more like labor laws than whistleblowing protection laws.
So, for example, you say something to your boss, your boss doesn't like it at that agency.
You get fired.
Well, then you get to tell the an agency advisor you to go to an advisory board and say, well, I was actually fired improperly because you can't fire me for my freedom of speech or you can't fire me for speaking out about this thing.
I was well within my rights to object.
And they say, OK, well, you're right.
You can get your job back.
But that doesn't fix the issue.
That doesn't solve anything.
That doesn't change the corruption within the agency.
They get to continue doing what they've been doing.
And you get to if if you're lucky and most times you aren't restored at all, but you get to come back to your job and you're still miserable because it's not any different than it was before you raised your voice.
So that's what they allow.
That's what we get.
Or you get these espionage acts, prosecutions where your life is completely destroyed.
Right.
All right, you guys, that is the great Kevin Gostola.
He's at Shadow Proof dot com.
Drone whistleblower Daniel Hale detained at facility where Chelsea Manning attempted suicide.
Thank you so much for all your great work, Kevin.
Thank you.
